


Missing Pieces

by CopperCaravan



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Adrenaline addiction, Brotherhood of Steel critical, Canon-Typical Violence, Codename: Tens, Dissociation, Existential Crisis, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Identity Issues, POV Alternating, Railroad Conspiracy, Self-Harm, Strangers to Lovers, assassins making friends, awkward Railroad agents are awkward, for everyone!, identity crisis, kind of Railroad critical, nods to PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-28
Updated: 2016-03-28
Packaged: 2018-05-26 05:07:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6225175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperCaravan/pseuds/CopperCaravan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deacon is good at making plans and Tens is good at pulling them off. Until they partner up. Once Deacon's got her, he's not so certain about his plan anymore. Once she's got a direction, she's not so certain she can follow through. But organizations, causes, forces like the Institute and the Railroad—the wheels start turning and they don't care about second-guessing or do-overs. They can't afford to. And Deacon and Tens couldn't either, not before. But now...</p><p>Deacon leads the survivor of Vault 111 to the Railroad but she's more than he'd anticipated, in lots of ways. But then she's sent to infiltrate the Brotherhood of Steel and everyone's forced to re-evaluate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Wasteland Welcome

**Author's Note:**

> For clarity: [month.day.year // time // location]  
> Blargha was my wonderful, wonderful beta reader! (And the only reason I got out of my funk and finished it, tbh.)  
> As of right now, chapters 1-3 are done and 4 is in the works and I'm planning a once-a-week update.  
> I don't write "canon" Nora. Although she uses "Whisper" in Railroad contexts, my Survivor’s name is Tens. I usually make a habit of only using canon surnames in fic but that obviously doesn't work in this case. She’s canon-divergent (in plenty of ways but mostly) in that I wasn’t feeling the whole “husband is a veteran; wife is a lawyer” thing. She’s also a veteran. Of a sort. Black Ops teams always go bad, as they say.  
> Also, and perhaps most importantly, for your comfort, please note: Tens self-harms. It's a thing she does. It's not caused by depression, and it's not a kink. It’s a very unhealthy coping mechanism for dissociation, but I want everyone to know it is coming and she does it on a regular basis. Some moments are a bit more graphic than others. Please consider that carefully before you continue if this is a sensitive issue for you.  
> Contains major and minor spoilers related to BoS questlines, RR questlines, Companions (Paladin Danse, Deacon), and Main questline, so peruse with caution. In fact, much of this assumes the reader is familiar with some of those arcs.  
> Canon compliant for a while and then things go all kinds of sideways, events get shifted around, I'm just playing with canon like it's a sandbox. The biggest differences are: after the Memory Den, the priority is the Institute itself and not Virgil AND that I changed the order of a few quests; does not cover the full line of the main quests.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Deacon and Tens meet. A few times. Also starring: Dogmeat, the Bobrov Brothers, Nick Valentine & jokes about game mechanics.

[10.22.2287 // 11:00 // Vault 111]

Her legs are too weak to hold her upright. Perhaps she’s in shock, perhaps the cryocell sucked all her strength away, or perhaps the weight of all those dead-eyed stares has stayed with her, followed her out of the Vault. When the elevator starts its upward grind back to the world, she’s on her knees, trying to shield her eyes from the white, hot, crushing light of a sun she doesn’t recognize. All she can see is her past, both lives spread out before her and no way for her to change anything that mattered.

...

[07.10.2076 // 02:50 // Medford]

She apparently has one shred of decency left in her (but definitely just the one) because she fights off her first instinct and doesn’t go straight for the alcohol.

The pregnancy test sits safely on the counter by the sink, the little pink lines ( _why the hell does it always have to be pink anyway,_  she thinks) facing away from her nest of self-pity in the bathtub. She’s stolen all their towels from the hall closet, all the good pillows from the couch, all the extra quilts from the linen closet, and she’s bundled up in the bathtub, trying to ignore how the word  _abortion_ is running through her mind without pause while Nate sleeps soundly and unaware in their bed.

She won’t do it, doesn’t think she could handle it. And maybe she should be... happy? Feel... blessed? She was never supposed to be able to have this, after all, but then, she’d never wanted it. Or at least, she’d never wanted it before she’d been decommissioned and she wonders if she’d feel differently if it was with... well, if it was with them. (How is it still so hard to say their names? Has she said them since? She doesn’t think she has.)

She loves Nate. He’s given her all he can, loved her in spite of all the secrets between them.  _He deserves better than this,_ she thinks, _better than me hiding in this bathtub, wishing away a baby and missing a team long gone._

She starts dragging out her little comforts, piling the pillows and blankets on the floor of the bathroom and fills the tub instead with hot water. _Hot_ water. Scalding, skin-flayed-all-to-hell, hot water. She admires the redness of her skin, the line that separates the part of her that is hurt and the part that is yet to be; so easy to see, so simple to understand. Then she sinks a little lower, burns another inch of her body.

She’s done well these last couple of years, to hide her habits. Pain like this, it’s easy to keep to herself, alone in the bath and with no worry of leaving evidence. And when it snows (and god, it snows so much here; she’s amazed by it every year), she walks through the snow uncovered, feet and hands and face stinging her, letting her feel  _awake_  until she goes back inside, back to “her” house and “her” husband and “her” new life. She’s burned the soles of her feet on the blistering hot concrete of their driveway in the summer. She’s got a slowly shrinking rubber band ball in her desk and a red spot on her wrist that never quite develops into a bruise, despite her constant popping. She’s given up smoking. She’s taken up sewing instead and, with it, the habit of pricking her fingers daily. These little pains, they aren’t quite what she wants—nothing like the adrenaline that comes from arming a bomb, or the blazing pain of a bullet wound—but they’re enough to occasionally pull her from her haze, to wake her up from this strange, hollow dream, if only for a few minutes at a time.

She sinks lower, savours the burn of another inch in the water.

Nate’s probably going to want to move to the suburbs; he’s been talking about it for a while now. They’ll have a garage and a house with a layout like every other house on the block. She’ll have to see about installing a secret closet, or bullet-proof glass for the windows. At the very least, a guard-dog. Something to give them an advantage. She can already hear Nate, bemused, asking why she thinks she’d need a tactical advantage over her neighbours. “Worried the local PTA will try to assassinate you?” And he’ll laugh and she’ll laugh too and say it’d just be nice in case of a break-in, what with all the political unrest lately. God, he’ll probably want to get one of those Mister Handy’s. She’ll need to figure out some sort of fool-proof remote shutdown function. Or get another gun.

Another inch lower, another few minutes of burning. The water’s beginning to cool, just a bit, and she supposes that when it does, she’ll get out and dry off, drop the pregnancy test in the trash can outside, go to bed and pretend nothing’s changed, if only for a few more hours.

 _I’m sorry, little baby,_ she whispers, resting her hands on the natural pouch of her tummy.  _I’m already bad at this. Nate’ll love you. And... and they’d love you too, if they could be here._

 _I’ll try to be a good mommy to you,_ she promises. When she’d first stepped off that plane and into her new life here, there’d been a song playing over the speakers in the baggage claim. She’d thought it far too fitting for any genuine comfort at the time but now... So she sings it to the baby, her voice so quiet and gentle, she barely recognizes it at all.

_Be not so nervous, be not so frail. Someone watches you; you will not fail. Be not so nervous, be not so frail._

The sting of the water has dulled away and soon, so will her scrap of adrenaline, so she pulls the plug and steps out of the bath. For a moment, she lets the sensation of the cold air and the cold floor pull her from her melancholy, but just like the water had cooled, the bathroom warms. She’s very tempted to return to her nest of soft, stolen things and just sleep on the bathroom floor. It wouldn’t be the first time Nate’s found her sleeping somewhere strange.

But no, she decides. The truth is, if she could have it all back—the good and the bad—she’d take it. She’d trade away her life, her husband, her... baby. She’d hand over everything she’s come to love and everything she hopes she can love, given enough time. She’d give it up without a second thought and shove her grief to the back of her mind, stamp down her guilt and sorrow and spend every day of the rest of her life glad that she’s returned to herself, what has always seemed to her to be her  _real_ self. So, no, she will not sleep here on this floor. She will not sleep alone. She owes this life, and the people in it, more than that (so much more than she can ever give, but this penance will just have to do). So she dries off and doesn’t bother with nightclothes, just knocks the pregnancy test off the counter, lets it fall behind the toilet, and walks back to the bed she shares with her husband.

_Be not so sorry for what you’ve done. You must forget them now..._

She dreams of her life before. As always.

...

[10.22.2287 // 11:02 // Vault 111]

When her eyes adjust to the light and she pulls her hands away from her face, she doesn’t know where she is. This... this can’t be...

_What the hell is this?_

...

[10.27.2287 // 17:05 // Sanctuary Hills]

 _Ok,_ she breathes.  _Ok, ok, ok._

It really is a wasteland. It really, really is.

She looks again at the gutted homes around her, echoes of the life she had before—before  _this,_ before whatever it is that’s happened.

Two hundred years, they tell her.  _Two hundred years_ and the moths and termites and rust couldn’t be bothered to eat away her husband’s laundered suit, her baby’s crib, her house in the goddamn suburbs.  _Two hundred years_ and her family is gone, her team is gone, her entire life is gone but the universe—bastard that it is—left her these reminders.

It hadn’t really hit her ‘til she’d come back, ‘til she’d led Garvey and his people to what they call their Sanctuary. The emptiness, the heat, hell, the goddamn death monster even—none of it had quite sunk in until she led them over the bridge and saw Sanctuary Hills the way they saw it. She’d seen it that way once too: as a sort of haven, as the end of a journey. But no more. Now... now, it’s just part of the scenery.

She can feel the weight of that life—her second life, her civilian life—rise off her shoulders, float into the air like fading smoke, and the guilt (oh, the  _guilt_ ) of that relief may bring her to her knees, may bring her to her death.  _And I’d deserve that,_ she decides, because Sanctuary isn’t her home now, isn’t her refuge, but her origin. And she has a second chance. Or a third.

She looks past the houses, past of all it, toward the Vault that brought her here. All those bodies down there, long dead. People who made her life so tranquil, so mundane: barbeques and book groups and baby showers. And her husband, who filled those last few years with laughter and love and comfort. But even still, she can’t quite bring herself to be sorry for all those days she took for granted, all those nights she missed her old life: her team and her partner and the covert, bloody work.

 _Reborn three times over now,_  she thinks and she sends up a silent  _thank you_ to the man who loved her, the partner she loved.

She whistles and the dog comes running. She’s missed having a partner; this isn’t quite the same, but she does like dogs.

“Nothing for us here, buddy,” she says, scratching between his ears. “Ready to kick some kidnapper ass?”

Dogmeat barks and wags his tail happily.

“Good,” she says and she turns away from Sanctuary Hills.

...

[10.29.2287 // 10:20 // Weston]

He knows her at once. As soon as he sees her, wandering along the road toward the bridge with a dog at her heels, Deacon knows: she’s it.

He watches her from his perch on the seat of the caravan and does a silent run-down.

_Vaultsuit: not impossible to acquire but 111’s not been opened since they shut it. Relatively clean and not many would dare (or be ignorant enough) to wear a bright blue, rubber suit out in the Wasteland._

_Skin and hair are too well-preserved for a Commonwealth native._

_Guns well modified and at the ready so either experienced or very adaptable. Or both._

_And,_ he thinks, smug as hell and with the smirk to match,  _I knew I wasn’t wrong about that Vault. Take that, PAM. In your mathy, metal face!_

He keeps his eyes firmly on her, but calls down to the two caravaneers below, fussing (as they have been all morning) with the broken wheel of the wagon. “Got a Wastelander inbound.”

“Shit,” one says, safely assuming the worst.

“I think we’re fine, Carl,” Deacon says, already knowing how he wants to play this. “She looks the type what can fix a wheel.”

Carl throws down his screwdriver and looks up at Deacon, shielding his eyes from the sunlight. “What the hell’s that mean?”

“It means you  _don’t_ look the type what can fix a wheel,” says the other trader.

“Well, thanks for the confidence, Pamela.”

“Ain’t a matter of confidence,” she says. “We been here three hours watching you fail.”

“I’m gonna wave her down,” Deacon says.

Carl tries to stop him—“Don’t you do it, Jim. Don’t you do it.”—but he’s already standing up, waving both arms and calling out to her.

“Hey! Hey, you! Vault Dweller, hey!”

She looks around, finally sees him several, several yards away, standing on top of the wagon. She’s hesitant— _smart,_ he thinks—but her dog seems happy enough to gallop toward them so she follows.

As she approaches, he takes note of her weapons: a baton strapped to her leg, two combat knives on her back, a 9 mil on her right hip and, interestingly, a genuine Institute laser pistol on her left.

 _Now, I was_ just  _at that Vault a few days ago; how’s she managed to already get mixed up with them between here and there?_

While she’s still a few yards away, she calls out to them. “Friendlies?”

_Military talk. Interesting._

“Yeah,” he calls back, holstering his own gun and jumping down off the caravan. Now she’s this close, he can see that her suit’s torn across the right bicep, singed around the edges, and her skin’s blistered raw.  _Burnt arm, in need of some meds. Might work as leverage._  Never hurts to have a plan B for when altruism surely falters.

Carl’s unsurprisingly gruff with her, but not hostile. Might serve his purposes, actually; nobody wants to help an asshole. Pamela, though, puts out her hand.

“Name’s Pamela,” she says.

The Vault Dweller is hesitant, but after a brief pause, she accepts a handshake. “Tens,” she says. “Nice to meet you.”

Pamela nods, tilts her head toward her partner. “Asshole’s Carl. Grouchy, got a twitchy trigger finger, so don’t try anything.” She looks over her shoulder at Deacon, who adjusts his sunglasses and waves. “That’s Jim,” she says. “Picked him up outside Concord about a week ago.”

“And what a hell of a lot of good it’s done,” Carl tosses in.  _Good ole Carl._

“You’re traders, then?” Tens looks at their wagon; it’s a quick once-over, not the kind of inspection that makes him expect she’ll rob them later. That’s a good sign, at least.

“Yeah,” Pamela tells her. “Assuming we can get back over the bridge.”

 _Way to be subtle, Pammy,_ he thinks. “Jim” probably ought to intervene, get to the point, see what the Vault Dweller with the weird name is made of.

“Don’t suppose you know anything about fixin’ wheels?”

“Don’t think there’s much hope of that,” she says, raising one of her eyebrows at their forward wheel; the thing’s practically been split in half. “But with all the shit laying around out here, bet I could make you a new one within the hour.” Deacon can’t place her accent. It doesn’t sound at all similar to anyone he’s met around here.

Carl scoffs. “And how many caps you be expecting for that?”

“You got any clean water?”

 _Very pragmatic,_ Deacon thinks admiringly.  _Got a decent head on her._

Carl almost gets out a grudging “yes” but Deacon beats him to it. “Afraid not,” he says, watching her carefully for any indication of... well, anything really: anger or annoyance or disbelief. “Sold the last batch a few days back.”

She only shrugs. “Alright then.”

... _Interesting._

...

[10.29.2287 // 11:45 // Weston]

At first, Tens just wanders around the immediate area, whistling something he’s never heard before and picking up trash. After a while, though, she hauls her scraps back over to the caravan and sits in its shadow, starts breaking things apart, putting things together, and humming all the while. He and Pamela sit alongside her, watching her work, while Carl sits atop the wagon on lookout duty (or, more likely, stewing over being shown up).

It’s interesting, he must admit, watching her hands as she knots some wire or hammers out some dented metal. Deacon’s a very clever man, but he’s never been much good at making things, let alone from salvage and scrap.

He lets Pamela do most of the talking, only throwing in an occasional question here and there when it suits the conversation, when it doesn’t seem too out of character for “Jim.” Jim’s not been particularly chatty, so he’s got to be careful, but man, he is dying to know where that Institute gun came from.

And thank god for Pamela because she opens things up for him beautifully.

“I couldn’t help but notice,” she begins. “That you have a lot of weapons.”

Tens wipes her forehead with her arm and finishes screwing a wooden...  _thing_  to a hubcap. It takes a good bit of effort and he can see her wince (maybe from the work, but he’s betting caps it’s that burn on her bicep). “Are you honestly telling me people around here  _don’t_ carry lots of weapons?”

“Oh, well of course they do, but I’m just wondering if you’d want to trade some of it. Could definitely use a gun like that one,” Pamela says, pointing to the laser pistol.

Deacon doesn’t miss his chance. “Where’d you get one of them, anyhow?”

“Met some people in Cambridge yesterday,” she says, sliding under the body of the wagon and beginning to affix her make-shift wheel to the axel.

He knows exactly what she’s talking about; they’d picked up that radio frequency too but Deacon hadn’t had to work too hard to keep them clear. Pamela and Carl can hold their own, but they aren’t stupid enough to drag a load-carrying Brahmin through cluttered streets full of ferals. And for some Brotherhood of Steel pricks, least of all. These two aren’t the type of people he could recruit himself, but there aren’t many willing to stand so close to the Brotherhood since it’s begun its steady rise to military strength. And yet, his Vault Dweller here had lent a hand. That’s not promising.

“Got shot at by some robots,” she continues, still under the wagon, her words punctuated by a grunt. “Picked up the nifty laser gun, tried to convince the guy to give me his cool armour on extended loan.” She laughs. “ _That_ didn’t go over well.”

There’s no way for “Jim” to ask without arousing suspicion, if not from Pamela, then certainly from Tens. She seems quick on the uptake, which is great, of course, until it’s not. But Pamela, once again, drops the bait for him. If Tens shies away from the prying, she won’t be squinting at him.

“Those Brotherhood types,” Pamela says. “They aren’t known for their good humour.”

“Oh, I dunno,” Tens says, wriggling her way back out from under the wagon and hopping to her feet. “Wasn’t so bad ‘til I, you know, told ‘em they sounded like power-grabbing nutcases and, uh, declined their invitation for Knighthood or whatever.” She dusts off her arms and legs and Deacon coughs to hide his laughter.  _My kinda Vault Dweller,_ he thinks, adding one more tally mark to the mental scoreboard he’s been keeping. He can’t  _wait_ to tell PAM how right he was. Again.

“Well,” she says, looking over her handiwork and giving it a thump. “Looks like you ought to be good to go now.”

Carl hops off the top of the caravan and starts prodding at the new addition to his wagon.

Pamela, at least, has the decency to say thank you, though she doesn’t, Deacon notes, try to offer their saviour any of the clean water they do actually have in the back. She does, however, offer a ride. “Why don’t you tag along for a while? We’ll head south in the morning.”

It’d be nice, to have easy access to her for a few more days, see how she operates, pry a few more answers from her, but he’s got a hunch...

“Thanks,” she answers. “But no thanks. Rather get as far as I can before dark; still got a while yet. Diamond City’s southeast, right?”

“Yeah,” Carl says, apparently pleased enough with his new wheel not to offer criticisms. “You get close enough, you’ll find the signs.”

Tens nods. “Alright then. Thanks.” And, simple as that, she turns around to leave.

 _But it can’t be as simple as that. It’s_ never  _as simple as that._

Deacon watches her take a few steps, her dog following happily behind. Carl’s not going to like it, he’s sure, but he got the info he needed; no reason to just let her  _actually_ walk off empty-handed.

“Hey,” he calls out, and she turns back to him. “At least let us put some meds on that arm, yeah?”

...

[10.30.2287 // 17:30 // Dugout Inn]

_Take me to the breaking of a beautiful dawn._

There’s something special about this song; it’s been tucked safely away in the back of her mind for so long. She sang it a lot, more than any other, she imagines, even back when she was with her team. She’d sing it while she waited for a briefing, or cleaned her gun, or walked the long hall to the Hole. And after that, too, she sang it: while she did laundry, or made breakfast, or rocked Shaun to sleep.

But she can’t quite remember what she was doing when she first heard it; it was so long ago. And even that isn’t quite accurate. What’s “long ago” compared to two hundred years? It’s hard to actually feel all the time that’s passed without her. Seems more like she slept in her car for a week and never woke up at all, just stayed on in some weird nightmare with a seatbelt buckle poking into her back.

There’s a commotion on the other side of the wall—the bartender’s boisterous laughter and what sounds, very specifically, like a plate smashing against the floor. She’s tempted to check it out (she’s always loved a good fist fight), but she only shrugs, opting to stay in the relative quiet of her rented room and the relative comfort of her rented bed.

_Take me to the place where we came from._

When she reaches toward the bedside table, the pain in her arm flares up. Those traders had wrapped it up for her, coated it in meds and given her a shot of antibiotics (“just in case,” Jim had said). But there’s something... invigorating about the hurt.

She twists her arm around, letting the wound pull to one side, then to the other. It’s an aching sort of pain, a much duller version of what it had been when it hit. That robot—no, Danse had called it a synth—that synth got her right at the end. She saw it coming too, saw it barrel through the doorway with its gun already trained on her and if she’d not jumped out of the way right then, she’d have had a hole in her chest, not just a bit off her arm. And goddamn, it had  _hurt._

“Sure could’ve used some of that fancy armour you’ve got,” she’d said to him, once she was back on her feet.

“I was thinking the same,” he’d said.

And she’d actually gotten excited there for a second—one hell of a reward, for sure—but then he’d just tried to rope her in to his little Brotherhood business and, much as she loves fights and guns and fancy armour, she’s not one for  _causes._ And Danse clearly believes in his cause.

He’s something between a soldier and a superior, she decides. Something dangerous in both firepower and devotion. She’s learned that the world’s usually better off when people only have one or the other. Still, Danse... well, he’d reminded her a bit of her old partner, back when they’d first met, before he learned to find the humour in all the horror.  _That’s what Danse needs,_ she thinks.  _A sense of humour. Probably hiding underneath all that metal casing._

Surely no one can actually be that serious. Not  _all_ the time. Maybe he just hasn’t heard the right joke yet. She does have quite an arsenal of pre-war knock-knock jokes...

_Take me to the end so I can see the start._

But she reaches toward her bedside table again, lets the pain in her arm remind her of just where she is, when she is, who she is. And, most importantly, she lets the pain remind her of who Danse is, or rather, who he isn’t. They’d fought off robots with laser guns, for fuck’s sake; it hadn’t been her and her old team pulling a job. He may have  _reminded_ her of her partner, but Danse is not her partner. That man’s gone. And, in a way, so is she. There’s two hundred and thirteen years difference between that Tens and this Tens. Not to mention the dead husband, the kidnapped son, and the amount of time it took to learn to run the goddamn washing machine without ruining all the clothes. ( _God,_ she remembers thinking, after her first batch of accidentally tie-dyed towels.  _I never thought I’d miss hand-washing underwear, but here we are._ )

She pulls a bent-up cigarette out of her pocket and lights it up. At least there’s this.

Dogmeat hops up onto the bed beside her and curls into a crescent-shaped bundle by her hip.

Small comforts.

And it is so easy to forget here, even with the radiation and the heat and the huge, evil monsters. Because right now, she’s in a bed (a filthy bed, but she’s slept in worse places) in a bar (a filthy bar, but she’s gotten drunk in worse places) with a smoke between her lips and an old song stuck in her head.

If she shuts her eyes tight and tries very hard, she can pretend none of it ever happened. No Vault, no bomb, no war.

She  _did not_ get decommissioned like a shitty, overworked airplane sent to die in a desert graveyard. She  _did not_ get dropped in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with a job that she didn’t even know how to do already assigned to her. She  _did not_ get shoved into a civilian life full of domestic chores and chatting housewives and whistling men along the sidewalks. She  _did not_ get married. She  _did not_ have a baby. And she  _did not_ have that baby stolen out from under her while she watched, helpless, from a very cold test tube.

No, right now, at this very moment, she’s in a cheap apartment. Her team’s in the other room—that’s where all the noise is coming from. She’s just hiding out in here, waiting for her partner to saunter in and make a stupid joke and tell her all about how great he was during their last job. She’s seeing that smile of his, wishing she had a beer and that he wouldn’t smoke in the bedroom. “You share this room with four other people,” she’s saying to him. “Have some courtesy, you jackass.”

_There’s only one way to mend a broken heart._

It’s like a dream, all of it. She wonders if her life was always set to be this way. Maybe if she’d been born in a different town, if her mom had worked a different job, if she’d never played basketball in middle school—all those little things, all those inconsequential things, they must be the key because she knows (oh, she  _knows_ ) that when it comes to the big decisions, she’d make the same ones all over again.

She inhales. It’s not relief, or calm, or anything so gentle as the smoke looks, rising and swirling and fading from her lips. No, a 200 year old cigarette is not a sweet inhale; it’s raspy, gritty, scratchy. It’s a stinging, burning, eye-watering pain from the top of her throat to the depths of her lungs. And god, is she ever happy about it.

Sure, people haven’t (thank god) lost the art of rolling their own smokes and sure, there’s plenty to be said for the Commonwealth’s brand of personally customized tobacco, but there’s nothing so comfortingly familiar as this beat to hell carton of Marlboros, dug out of an old desk drawer. Shitty even when they were new, but damn if they don’t remind her of home when it felt like home.

He used to smoke these, her partner. Four a day if they got a shower, three a day if not. His clothes carried the smell, his favourite gun, his footlocker, his armour. It was so much a part of him that it even won out over of the smell of the gun oil and cleaner. It was something she could hold onto, in the fights that didn’t go well, the times she thought she couldn’t win—a whiff of cigarette smoke and she’s back on track, back in the game, because if he’s got her back, she’s got to stay alive to have his too. So she did.

“And where are you now?” Not here. Not anywhere.

Maybe it’s an appropriate punishment then, this emptiness, because it doesn’t even require admission: she misses him, misses her team, misses her work more than she misses her husband, more than she misses her domestic life, more than she misses her son. Fuck.

There’s no reason to hide anything now, and she can’t get lost here, can’t let herself get caught in the haziness of it all, of the bad dreams or the good memories or even the occasionally quiet moments of reality. So she shoves the still bright and burning end of her cigarette against the soft flesh above the crook of her elbow, shuts her eyes and leans her head against the wall, lets the sting invigorate her, wake her up just for a while.

...

[11.07.2287 // 18:45 // Dugout Inn]

The problem is that Tens is very, very drunk.

Or, that’s one of the problems, anyway. She hadn’t thought, when she sat down at the bar, that it would make things worse; in fact, it had seemed, at the time, like a decent solution to the other problem: namely, that her son is still gone. And the bastard who took him. And also that Nick’s busy working tonight and she didn’t want to sit in the agency office and listen to Ellie’s optimism. Then there’s the fact that she’s been having nothing but shitty dreams about Nate, who, she has to concede, certainly deserves to be as angry as he is when he appears in those dreams. Plus, her favourite gun got fucked all to hell earlier this week when she and Nick were in—

Point is, she wanted to get drunk, so she did. And now Yefim won’t leave her alone about the dog.  _Who the hell cares about sanitary eating conditions when they grill up bloatflies for supper?_

She leans back on her bar stool and scratches Dogmeat between the ears. “Just—just look at him, Yefim. He’s the best dog. He’s just the best dog. How can you throw him out?”

Yefim throws up his hands and stares at his brother across the bar. “Vadim, you have to do something with her. She does not listen to me.”

“Oh, no,” Vadim says, turning away from them both to pour a beer for another, less troublesome patron. “I am not to be telling her anything. I like the dog. You do not like the dog, you do the telling and the throwing.”

“Yefim,” Tens says, leaning, now, dangerously toward him. “Has anyone ever told you that your accent is like stepping into a hot bath with a glass of whiskey?”

“No,” he says flatly. “No, they do not tell me this but you are not to be keeping the dog in the bar with compliments.” And then, after a pause for thought, his brows knit together. “This was a compliment, yes?”

Tens nods enthusiastically and a little beer sloshes out of her glass. As it drips down her arm, Dogmeat puts his front legs on the barstool and licks it off her elbow. She’s not sure if she’s giggling at the dog or Yefim’s horrified expression.

“You are not to be keeping the dog in the bar,” he says again, a bit more forcefully.

“Why do you treat me this way, Yefim? I just—I just wanna drink your fucking booze and pay my tab and try to get your nose out of that newspopper—newspaper,” she stammers. “I just wanna be your  _friend,_ Yefim. Why’re you always so tacitum—tacitim—taci—goddammit. Why are you always so grumpy?”

Vadim laughs at that. “You will have to try much harder than that to get him out of the newspaper.”

As if to prove the point, Yefim crosses his arms over his chest and gives her a grumpy stare to rival every grumpy stare he’s ever given her before. “If you are to be staying with the dog, you are to be staying with the dog outside the bar. And also, I will be taking this,” he says, whisking her beer right out of her hand.

“Oh! That’s just overkill, Yefim!” Even still, she’s glad to see him at least up and out of that chair in the corner. At least he’s talking; at least he’s _doing_ something other than cleaning or cooking or moping around the house— _around the bar_ , she corrects quickly. This isn’t the suburbs; this isn’t Sanctuary Hills.

“I am not over killing you. You are being dramatic.”

“She is being very drunk,” Vadim corrects. “And we do own bar; this is good.”

Something shiny catches her eye behind Yefim’s scowling face, so she reaches toward him to move him out of the way.

_Sunglasses? Inside?_

_... Jim?_

But Yefim interprets this as her trying to take back her drink and jerks it away, spilling quite a bit on the floor, which Dogmeat is more than happy to lap up.

“See? Dog is helping,” Vadim tries, but his brother isn’t having it.

“Dogs are not to be drinking this!”

Tens turns her attention away from the man in the sunglasses, sitting at a table alone and smiling at his full glass of booze. “He lives in a radioactive fallout zone, Yefim,” she says. “A little beer’s not gonna kill him.”

“You are irresponsible dog owner,” he says, still holding her beer as far away as he can.

“I am—” She is actually offended, is what she is. “I am a  _great_ dog owner! And I paid for that beer! You give it back!”

But he just shakes his head and takes a step away from her when she rises from her stool.

“Yes! Yes I am,” she says, taking a few steps toward him. She holds her hands out in front of her like claws and can’t help but smirk when he backs up a few more inches. “I’m a  _really_ shitty mother, but I am a  _great_ dog owner and I paid for my beer!”

“You can have your beer when you are putting the dog in your room!”

She takes a few more steps forward and he, a few back, and Vadim doesn’t seem inclined to help either of them.

“Am I, ah, interrupting somethin’ here?”

 _Oh thank god._ Tens spins around to face the door ( _that was a terrible idea,_ she realizes, almost falling on her face) and Nick’s standing there looking at her like she’s lost her mind. To be fair, given the scene, she doesn’t blame him.

Still, it’s probably a good thing he showed up. What she doesn’t need is for Yefim to  _actually_ kick her out for a drunken disorderly... or whatever the Post-Atomic Bomb Wasteland Bullshit Equivalent is.

“Oh, Nick, I’m so glad you’re here,” she says, and she wants to fling herself into the water supply for sounding so pitiful.  _I_ am _a good dog owner, goddammit._

“Rough day, I take it?” He puts out his smoke and settles in to her vacated bar seat. Only now, drunk and sad, does it occur to her that Nick’s got a mostly-robotic body. _So the smoking..._  But that’s something she’s never going to ask him. In fact, she doesn’t think she needs to ask after all. She’d been a smoker before, well, _this_  but she sucks down quite a few more nowadays _._ It just reminds her—no, she definitely doesn’t need to ask him.  Instead, she ceases her advance on Yefim (who is visibly relieved and still quite unhappy) and hops up onto the bar stool next to Nick.

“Rough _day_? More like rough two hundred and thirteen years,” she says, propping her elbows on the bar and letting her face sink into the palms of her hands.

Vadim slides her another beer and she drags her finger around the rim of the glass. “So,” she says. “How’s your case going?”

“Stagnant,” Nick tells her, putting his hat next to him on the bar. “Thought I had something the other day, but the guy’s just vanished.”

“Yeah well, a man doesn’t get the name  _Mysterious Stranger_ for nothing,” she says, but she gives him a playful dig with her elbow, just to let him know she’s teasing. There’s not enough give—not enough  _flesh_ —and for a second, she’s caught by surprise. It’s so easy for her to forget Nick’s a synth. She glances away from him, wishes it was that easy for  _him_ to forget it too.

“But I do have some good news,” he says. “I’ve got a lead on Kellog.”

She sits upright so quickly, she almost topples over. Even Vadim takes notice, though he tries not to show it, putting extra care into polishing a glass.

“What, really? Well, let’s go. Come on!” She means to hop down, even remembers she ought to get her coat off the rack by the door, but Nick reaches out and holds her by her wrist.

“I’m not lettin’ you go out there now,” he says. “No offense, but you’re not great in the dark even when you’re sober.”

“But Shaun—”

“No,” he says firmly. “You’re just gonna get yourself killed.”

She wilts. Every time she thinks she’s taken a step forward, a step toward her son, something goes wrong, sends her another step backwards instead.

And this time, it’s her own goddamn fault. Because the problem is that Tens is very, very drunk.

 _I could be out there right now,_ she thinks.  _I could be... I could fix this. I could..._

“You couldn’t,” Nick says, and she realizes she was talking out loud. Just another reason being drunk was a bad idea. Her and her fucking mouth.

“I never wanted any of it, Nicky,” she whispers, hoping only that no one else can hear her. “I never wanted a baby or a house or... And now I don’t have it.”

He puts his hand on her shoulder—the more human one, she notes; she can tell, though she doesn’t look. “This ain’t your fault, sweetheart.”

But he doesn’t understand. When the Institute tossed him out, he never tried to go back. He moved forward, did good things, became a good man. But her—no, not her. When Sir told her it was all over, she didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to let go. She was lucky to get out of that life alive and yet she spent every day of the last three years of her second life wishing for nothing but the days of her first one.

And even now— _even now_ —she wishes she could have it back: her team and her partner and her bloody, bloody work.

“If it isn’t my fault, it should be.”

...

[11.12.2287 // 21:00 // Diamond City]

It was that damn airship that prompted Deacon’s anxiety in the first place. He’d have stayed the night in a clean(ish), warm bed and worried about getting back to Diamond City in the morning, but oh no, the goddamn Brotherhood had to go and get a goddamn airship.

“Our intentions are peaceful,” they’d said. Yeah, right, well, riding into town on a war machine makes that a little hard to believe, assholes.

After that first encounter with the survivor of Vault 111, Deacon had been worried he might lose track of her. Well, actually, no, he’d been worried she’d get killed (probably by something large and angry and in a very gruesome manner) and it would have been  _extremely_ inconvenient to spend his time looking for a woman who’d died somewhere out in the Wasteland. But hey, a Railroad agent doesn’t have the luxury of downtime for babysitting, so he’d let her wander away from the wagon, wounds tended, and he’d hoped for the best.

As it turns out, she hadn’t gotten killed (go team!) and, what’s more, she wasn’t all that hard to find again. In fact, she made it suspiciously easy and—also suspiciously—she’d given him quite the incentive, what with the trail of happy settlers and free favours and goodwill left in her wake. _She’s got to be testing me,_ he’d thought.  _Got to be trying to lure me out._ But surely she hadn’t picked up on anything important during her brief time with him at the wagon. Surely she hadn’t figured out who he was. Nobody was  _that_ good (excepting him, obviously).

But then.

But then, he found her in Diamond City, cleaning up the water supply and painting the wall, chatting with Abbot and Sheffield like they were old pals.

But then, he saw her limping back through the city gates, bruised all to hell, with the recently missing Nick Valentine safely in tow and a grin on her face.

But then, he watched her eyes light up as she sat in a class with a bunch of ten year olds, learning about the evolution of two-headed mutants.

 _So no, she’s not a spy. She’s not an Institute agent or a decoy,_  he’d decided. _She’s just... inexplicably kind. And pretty fucking weird._

And after he’d watched her a while, he got used to her schedule ( _and that’s the first thing that’ll have to go,_ he’d thought, _can’t have an agent with habits_ ). So it wasn’t surprising that he’d leave for a few days on a job and she’d be right where he’d left her: in the Dugout, or at the Noodle Stand, or on the roof of Valentine’s Detective Agency.

But after the incident at the bar (and Jesus, what a way to spend his afternoon), she’d run off again with Nick. And, you know, ok,  _fine_. Except that when Deacon gets back into the city this time, pissed and anxious about the Brotherhood’s new toy, guess who isn’t at the Dugout, or the Noodle Stand, or on the agency roof. His damn Vault Dweller, that’s who.

It’s not good practice to just ask where somebody is—not when your entire organization thrives on covert operations—but he’s gotten no leads from anyone in this damn city ( _and how’s that even possible,_ he sulks,  _when she’s got a friend in every crack and corner_ ) so he tries to reel in his frustration as he stomps his way over to Valentine’s place to ask that perky secretary where they went.

 _Gotta come up with a whole story now,_ he thinks sullenly.  _Gotta explain what exactly I need with “Mr. Valentine and his friend.”_

And, just like he’d predicted, the secretary does ask him that. But he’s not in the right frame of mind, hasn’t had the time, to come up with an entire persona for this shit. He adjusts his sunglasses and gives her a friendly smile.

“Well, ma’am,” he says, trying to imitate Tens’ accent (he still hasn’t placed it). “I’ve got news from her friends.”

“Oh,” she says, perking right up. “You mean from those folks back at Sanctuary Hills?”

 _Sanctuary Hills._ He’d forgotten someone had settled there; should’ve connected the dots. He adds that to the list; maybe he’ll stop by there, get a feel for the place and the people in it, see what he can learn from them. “Yes ma’am,” he says. “It’s a bit of an emergency, if you don’t mind.”

She nods her head in understanding. “It’s Preston again, isn’t it? I swear, that boy worries her about things like nobody’s business. Always wants her running back and forth with supplies and favours and all sorts of things he could just as easily do himself.” She punctuates her little rant with a huff. Clearly, this Preston fellow has a long to-do list. Also very interesting.

“Yes ma’am. Afraid so,” Deacon says, bowing his head contritely for her trouble. He’ll  _definitely_ have to make a trip to Sanctuary Hills at some point.

“Well,” she says, propping her hands on her hips and rolling her eyes. “If it’s Preston, she’ll want to know. Nick said they were heading to Goodneighbor, but he didn’t say what for. Not sure how long they’ll be there either, so you better hurry over.”

“Thank you very much, ma’am.”

He turns to leave but she calls out after him. “Oh! What’d you say your name was?”

“David,” he says, defaulting to the last name he remembers hearing. “I’m a close friend.”

...

[11.18.2287 // 14:45 // Goodneighbor]

“No,” she says. “Nick, absolutely not. I don’t want you to do this.”

That’s when Deacon  _knows._

Her own child on the line and she doesn’t want to risk a synth—a  _friend_ , she calls him. That’s exactly what the Railroad needs, exactly what it already is.

“We’ll figure out another way to do this,” she says.

In a way, he’s a bit puzzled: he doesn’t know if he ought to commend her for her loyalty to her “friend” or condemn her for her lack of it toward her son. It’s not her actions, but her priorities, her motivations, that he’s questioning.

Even still, that’s when he knows: he wants her on his side.

So after Nick and the Good Doctor convince her that there is no other way, after they’ve both been hooked up to Amari’s memory gizmo because _Nick’s_ not willing to back down, after she’s learned that it’s the Institute that has her son, that’s when Deacon starts whispering about the Railroad. He’s chatting with the guards, getting a drink at the bar, browsing at the trading carts, but always he whispers “The Railroad.”

She doesn’t see him—they never do—but he sees it on her face when things click into place.

It's a good look for her, he decides.

...

[11.22.2287 // 18:05 // Old North Church]

 _It’s a goddamn wonder anybody makes it here at all,_ she thinks, when she finally gets to what she supposes is their base of operations. She had to fight through whole streets of ferals and rabid dogs and super mutants and even giant glowing rodents just to get here.  _How do they expect to recruit people this way?_

And then she’s met with the angriest faces she’s seen yet (on humans, anyway). And of course, they’re pointing guns at her. Why’s everybody in this fucking wasteland always pointing guns at her? Did she not set up three— _three—_ water purifiers last week? Does that not earn her any good will around here? Fuck. It’s not like it’s  _easy_  making a water purifier from salvaged car parts.

“Look, I’m not here for a fight,” she tries. “I just heard you guys could help me. I’m looking for my kid, for the Institute.”

The woman in front—the Ringleader, she supposes—gives her a cautious look. “And what made you think to come here?”

But her deliverance comes in a pair of sunglasses—at first all she thinks is that it’s stupid, wearing sunglasses underground, but then she feels the strangest sense of déjà vu—and when he tells them to hold, they do (although the scowls stay firmly in place). 

“I’ve seen her around,” he says and she narrows her eyes, tilts her head to the side. “She knows her stuff. We could use her.”

The woman in front looks her over one more time. “Fine,” she says. “But you better make damn sure she’s worth it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The lyrics "Be not so nervous [...] You must forget them now..." are from Bill Fay's Be Not So Fearful.  
> The lyrics "Take me to the breaking [...] mend a broken heart..." are from The Wailin' Jennys' Beautiful Dawn.  
> And yes, this thing is the reason I've been slow to update other things, but that should straighten out soon.


	2. In Medias Res

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Deacon and Tens go on a few runs and just when they think they've got things figured out, they realize they don't. Also starring: Desdemona, Glory, & a few more jokes about game mechanics.

[12.08.2287 // 16:35 // Boston Common]

“Motherfucking goddamn son-of-a-bitching bastard!” She’s somewhere in this room, in what he supposes was a kitchen a very long time ago. He can’t see her, but he’s sure everyone (and everything) within a six block radius just heard her screaming obscenities at whatever luckless piece of garbage won’t fit into her bag this time.  _Whisper. Ha. Haven’t heard her whisper once._

“Now,  _that_ was almost impressive,” he says, holding his sunglasses in place and climbing as gracefully as one possibly can over a pile of trash and rotten food. Thank whatever asshole gods there are that they’re so close to Goodneighbor. He’s so sick of sleeping in places like this, or of trying to sleep in them, at least. Sure, he’s adjusted over the years, but damn, who turns down a clean bed when they can get it? “Did you use your entire vocabulary in that... sentence?”

“Shove it, Deacon.” And there she is, finally giving up and tossing some old-world hunk of junk over her shoulder. It clangs at his feet and he wonders if she’d realized how close behind her he was.  _Probably aiming for me,_ he thinks with a smirk.

“I feel like you didn’t put as much effort into that one,” he says, pushing the rusty, discarded round thing out of his way with his foot. “Am I not as deserving as the toaster? I’m hurt. Really.”

“It was a waffle iron.” She props her fists on her hips and tilts her head up toward the overhead cupboards, doors barely hanging by their hinges. “Humour me,” she says, without turning around.

“Anything,” he agrees (far too readily, he realizes). He shrugs it off. “What would you like me to do in the sixty seconds we have to get out of here before your obscenely loud and obscenely obscene monologue draws all manner of baddies and beasties to us?”

“Fuck, you love hearing yourself talk,” she says. But she’s laughing. It’s not just the sound of it—sort of awkward, really, a bit too loud, a bit too breathy, nothing so whimsical as wind chimes or birdsong, that’s for fucking sure—but it’s in the shake of her shoulders, in her arm wrapping around her stomach as she leans forward.  _Sincerity._ He can’t believe she’s got any of that left, but even so, he’ll have to break her of it. The thought almost makes him... regret. But thoughts of the alternative prevent that nonsense. “You’re right though,” she manages when she’s done laughing. “Never mind.”

“No, no.” He holds up his hands, surrendering to her and her whims (and god, does she ever have plenty of them). “What is it? What d’you want?” She ought to know by now that she’ll get her way; probably _does_ know.

But she turns to him and shakes her head, still wearing that impossible grin. “No, I mean you’re right that we have to leave. I’ve got to... get used to being quiet again, I think.”

 _Being quiet again._ Another clue for him to add to the list. Right alongside the music she likes and her habit of hoarding paper. He’s got a decent idea of who she is now, of Whisper in the Commonwealth. But the rest of her—“Tens,” she’d been calling herself, “and no, I’m not from around here”—he wants to figure that woman out too. “You  _think_?”

She shoulders her overfull bag (and tosses him a now equally full extra he didn’t even know she’d had stowed away) and nods her head toward Goodneighbor and a job waiting to be done. “Come on, tiger, let’s find somewhere relatively clean to sleep.”

_Tiger? Not the worst thing I've ever been called._

“I’d settle for somewhere not overrun with super mutants, but yeah, clean comes in a close second.”

...

[12.09.2287 // 01:15 // Goodneighbor]

She loves Magnolia’s music. Every time she’s come into the Third Rail before, she’s ended up drunk and swaying to the music, happy to accompany the singer’s performance with one of her own. One day she’ll work up the nerve to ask if she can have a turn at the mic. One day.

Not today though.

 _God, this damned wig,_  she thinks sullenly, trying to inconspicuously scratch the constant itch along the edges of the black mop Deacon has insisted she wear. The costume is one thing; she can handle a bit of dress up. But was the wig really necessary? With the lights so dim and the place so busy, couldn’t they have just given her a haircut and hoped no one noticed?  _Surely Glory’s never subjected to this kind of bullshit._

More than that, though, is the incessant nagging in the back of her mind. They’ve got a job to do and yet he’s dragged her into this bar, covered her in fabric and make-up and hair that makes her want to crawl out of her own skin, all to school her in a skill that she really doesn’t think she can master, however confident Deacon is in his teaching abilities.

She is no spy. An infiltrator, yes. Of a sort. A weapon hidden in the shadows, yes. A recon, retrieval, and clean-up crew, yes. But blending in, hiding in plain sight—that’s not her bag. And it’s not getting their job done either. They’re supposed to be shooting up a street of Gunners, supposed to clearing the way for an Institute runaway. Not... whatever this is.

She leans toward him (takes a little pleasure in the fact that at least he’s wearing a stupid wig too) and nudges him in the ribs with her elbow. “Should we really be here?” She’s quiet, despite the din of the bar definitely being loud enough to conceal their voices.

“Well yeah,” he whispers back. “Why not?”

“What about the package?” She flicks some of the wig hair out of her eye and Deacon gives her a look, one that says  _stop messing with the wig,_ so she does.

“We can’t do anything this late,” he says, trying to pacify her. It doesn’t really work. “You’re allowed to relax in the meantime.”

“I guess,” she says, slumping against the back of the booth.

He loops an arm around her shoulder and drags her closer to him, dropping some caps into her hand. “Here,” he whispers. “Why don’t you practice on Charlie? Pretend you’re buying some beer?”

“Yeah, ok,” she says, but she just can’t get into it. What’s she supposed to try to pry out of Charlie? Magnolia’s favourite drink?  _You’d think that after all these runs, he’d realise my talent lies in shooting, not in spying._ What she hates, really, is that she can tell he’s looking for something in her that she just doesn’t have. He’s got so much hope, so much confidence in her potential for his brand of work but that’s never been who she is (even when she was someone else). And she’s tired of waiting for the inevitable disappointment. Deacon’s so sure she’s “on the up and up,” but she’s not top-tier material; she’s a soldier. And she’s not good at subtlety. It’s beyond her, what he saw in her to make him think she was capable of this sort of thing, yet here they are. It reminds her of civilian life—pretending she was nothing but her husband’s wife, nothing but her son’s mother, nothing but a woman with a house in the suburbs. She got lost in that and she’s determined not to get lost in the Commonwealth. Not like this, at least.

Deacon must sense her mood (to be fair, she’s practically wearing it like perfume) because he leans in a little closer and gives her shoulders a quick squeeze. “Come on,” he says, low enough that no one else can hear. “You can do this. All you have to do is be yourself. Just... a little different.”

She rolls her eyes. “That is great advice,” she says, but she can’t help smirking at his poorly chosen words. “I’ll remember that the next time I want to ask someone on a date. Throw in a good pick-up line too. ‘Hey there, big guy, are you always this  _irradiated_?’ Bet it’ll work like a charm.”

He laughs despite his best efforts to restrain himself, which makes it all the more satisfying. It’s a rare thing to be able to catch him off guard with a joke. He’s got his own sense of humour, sure, but he’s so... focused on being in control all the time, catching him off guard with  _anything_ is a champion’s feat. “You trying to distract me Agent Loudmouth?”

“Depends,” she sulks. “Is it working?”

He shifts a bit and shrugs. “A little. But not enough to get you off the hook. Now come on. Roleplay.”

And she can’t help but laugh at that. The man loves hearing himself talk but sometimes she wonders if he ever listens to himself at all.

“You know what I mean,” he says sternly, but she doesn’t.  _That’s the damn problem._  “When you’re doing this, you’re a role, a character. You just sort of... slip another layer over yourself.”

She wonders how many layers Deacon is wrapped up in. She wonders if he  _ever_ remembers to take them off when he’s done.

He twists a lock of hair from her wig around his fingers. “Try thinking of it that way: you keep the same base, but you change up the details—how you hold a smoke, what kind of beer you like, the color of your hair. You get it?”

“You know,” she says, letting her head fall back against his arm in frustration. “When I did go undercover, it was always with a sniper rifle.”

“A sniper rifle, huh?”

Oh shit. He’s doing that—that thing again. That thing where he tries to pull her apart, analyze her, piece her back together. Hazard of the job, she supposes, but damn. He’s got his secrets; can’t she have hers? Hell if he’s _got_ to know he could at least just _ask_.

But after a quick glance toward the entrance, he seems just as content to get back to her “training.” She doubts “training” is even the appropriate word when she’s so certain there’s no possibility for improvement.

“Ok,” he says, so quiet she can hardly hear. “Say a fellow just walked in and I need to whisk him off to a thrilling interrogation without anyone in here noticing. What do we need?”

“A distraction,” she says without pause.

“A big, loud one,” he agrees. “Think you can do that for me?”

Well of course she can. She’s  _very_ schooled in big, loud distractions. She’s also, not coincidentally, very schooled in explosives, although she doubts that’s the answer to this particular problem.  _Would be fun though,_ she muses,  _if I didn’t like this bar so much._

She spares a quick look around the bar, but doesn’t see anyone suspicious.  _But I guess they wouldn’t_ look  _suspicious, would they?_ “So...  _did_ someone walk in?”

He rolls his eyes at her. “Yes,” he says quickly. “So impress me: make some noise and stay incognito while you do it.”

“I can do that,” she says, finally perking up.

Now this—this is her bag. Reminds her of old times, even, although the company was different.

He gets out of the booth first, heading toward the back of the room, and she takes a quick look around, searching for her unlucky target.  _No, no, maybe, no, no—_

And there he is: male, late twenties, several drinks in, the scarred knuckles of a brawler, and the scowl of a temperamental drunk.  _Yes._ She runs her hands over her hips, feeling the pistol concealed there just in case this goes sideways. A smooth run or a shoot-out, so long as the job gets done, who cares? But still, it’d be nice to prove—to Deacon and to herself—that she has  _some_ skill in the “not making a spectacle of herself” department.  _Ha. Yeah right._

She rubs her palms over her eyes, hopefully smearing the make-up Deacon had convinced her to slather on. Then she walks quickly past the man’s table and trips right over his boot.

He rises from his seat (nearly knocking over the table and every empty bottle on it) with what looks like the intent of telling her to watch where the hell she’s going, but that’s when she employs her  _other_ weapon. When her face falls into worry and sadness (although she can’t quite manage to draw out the tears), her new friend goes from volcanic to sympathetic in seconds.

It doesn’t take much—a quiet apology, a bit of frightened hesitance, a reluctantly pointed finger—and the man is across the bar in three long strides, fist in the air, screaming at the “offender.”

She winds her way through the gathering crowd, trying to keep from being noticed, and spots Deacon watching her (and very much not interrogating anyone) from the back, near the stairs.

Before she reaches him, she hears a crash, turns back to see that her angry drunk has thrown his opponent through a table.

_Time to go. Definitely time to go._

Deacon, equal parts bemused and proud, ushers her up the stairs, shielding her face from the growing crowd in the bar. Most of them aren’t looking her way (they’ve got new entertainment now), but just in case.

“Very clever,” he whispers.

“Thanks,” she says back, very pleased with herself. She’s done things like this before, but there’s something satisfying in being able to meet his expectations, even with all his talk of subtlety and shadow. “And I see your fake interrogation went well.”

He only grins at her. She’s not sure if she’s amused or annoyed.

“Caught me out, did you? Well, you know, had to get you motivated,” he says.

“Liar, liar,” she chides.

He just laughs. “Did you have to get an innocent bystander tossed into a table? Desperate times and all that, but this  _was_ just a practice run.”

“Nah,” she says, pushing open the main door and stepping into the dark of a Goodneighbor night. “He threw a drink on Magnolia a few weeks ago. Guy had it coming.”

“You don’t say.” He smiles again, pleased with her success (she hopes), and is silent a moment before he continues. “You should’ve picked Charmer, I think,” he says quietly, as they walk across the street.

She just laughs. “And why’s that, I wonder?”

“We’re there for a half hour and you manage to cause more property damage than the atom bomb—”

“Now, that’s a bit of an exaggeration,” she argues. But she can’t deny that his embellishments are oddly comforting. “It was just one table.”

“—all with a few words and some fake tears,” he finishes. “And... well, I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve heard you whisper the entire time we’ve been working together.”

She laughs a little louder. “What can I say? I’m not the whispering type.”

“Clearly. My question, then, is why you picked that name in the first place.”

He holds open the door of Rexford and she flips her wig with her hand, a last-ditch effort to play her part. At least in all the excitement, she’d forgotten how itchy it was (until just now, anyway). “I thought Nick would like it,” she just says with a shrug.

He doesn’t believe her. She can tell. It makes her grin all the wider because of all the things she could lie about, this one seems a little too trivial to bother. It’s the truth. She likes Nick, likes it when he smiles at something he genuinely enjoys, likes to see him feeling human, likes to see him forget—just for a second—that he’s got so much weight on his shoulders. And she likes being the one to do that for him. So she picked a silly name, one that would later cause Nick to chuckle, to lean into her back at his place and say “Whisper? Really?” What’s she care for a codename, anyway? She’s already got one, already got plenty.

Finally, after what feels like a solid two minutes of Deacon studying her face for any hint of deception— _so puzzled,_ she thinks, _and over the littlest things_ —he shakes his head and laughs a little, throws some caps on the counter for their room and sighs. “Well goddamn.”

...

[12.09.2287 // 02:20 // Goodneighbor]

_I lived off rats and toads and I starved for you. I fought off giant bears and I killed them too. And every single step of the way..._

He can hear her singing even with the bathroom door shut. Thin walls here—well, everywhere really. It’s weird, trying to reconcile the gentle and passable soprano in the bathroom with the angry and loud expletives that she employs under stress. Even weirder how used to her singing he’s gotten. Sometimes he finds himself mouthing the words right along with her, silently singing songs far older than the war, songs he’d never even heard before they met (or well, before he met her and she met a caravan guard outside Weston;  _one day I probably ought to tell her,_  he thinks).

At least it’s the Rexford tonight; it’s the nicest place they’ve stayed on a job since she started, which is a relief. He was getting tired of shoving old desks against old doors in old buildings full of recently dead raiders (and man, oh man, can she knock ‘em dead). He’s laid claim to the mattress by the window. When she comes out of the bathroom, he’ll make a big deal out of it, remind her how much seniority he has (“I  _deserve_ the good bed,” he’ll say) and she’ll cozy up on the other side of the room, as far away from the window as she can be, and she won’t have to ask. She’s bad at that: asking for what she wants. Hell, she’s bad at asking for what she needs, too. Makes no sense considering she can easily sweet talk her way into or out of anything.

It’s a habit of hers, maybe, something she can’t seem to break out of. Just like the singing while she does something menial, bathing or cleaning or making a fire. He’s told her a hundred times not to do it and it seems to be one of the few lessons she has a hard time learning (elsewise, she’d be a fine agent already; wouldn’t need him around at all, if she even really does).

“You’ll give yourself away,” he warns her, every time. “Someone’s going to hear you.”

“Sorry, sorry!” And she promises not to forget this time (“I swear!”) but she always does.

He shouldn’t be glad for it. He’s finding there are many things like that, things he shouldn’t be glad for. They all seem to revolve around her company.

He’s never been one for company. Not... well, not lately, anyway. If by  _lately,_ he means the last several, several years. And when Des had insisted he make himself available for babysitting, he wasn’t particularly thrilled, even if he had been the one to recommend Whisper for recruitment. He’d seen her around—she had the skills, had the motivation, had the decent intentions that would make her a good fit and a good agent for the Railroad—but he didn’t really blame Des for being so cautious (or Carrington, but fuck if he’ll ever admit  _that_ ).

Still, his people skills, as precision sharp as they are, are also a bit... rusty. When it’s work, well, it’s work. It’s a play. It’s a game. It’s a puzzle. And Deacon loves puzzles.

But when it’s not work, he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

It’s different when he’s on a job. Then he can do whatever he wants: convince someone at the bar to buy him a round, have his pick of the ladies and gents in town; damn, he came back to the Switchboard with a pet radstag once (they wouldn’t let him keep it, the bastards) and a hell of a story regarding his acquiring of said beastie. All he has to do is play the right character, use the right pieces, tip the right hat. In HQ, too, he’s _Deacon,_ he’s  _the Railroad’s number one,_ he’s  _the best intel man on record._  And he never has to stay long enough to be anything else, not with all the work to be done, not when he can change his name, change his face, change anything and everything about himself with some caps and the right surgeon.

But when he’s all alone—those long days and nights in the vast expanse of the Commonwealth between the end of a job and the next dead drop—he doesn’t know who he is anymore, which pieces of him are him and which pieces of him are pieces of others, are pieces of lies he’s told and lies he’s lived and strangers he’s watched. He’s a mess of puzzle pieces that don’t really fit because they’re all from a bunch of other pictures.

And when he’s in the room with someone real, with  _company,_ the company’s the only person in the room. Deacon isn’t real. And he doesn’t like thinking about it. But lately all he’s got is company; it makes it hard to forget, to ignore, to pretend. She’s always around, expecting conversation or habits or mannerisms, expecting substance from a man who doesn’t exist—( _liar, liar_ )—from a man it’s easy to forget exists.

The Third Rail was a welcome change of scenery—a room full of people who weren’t people but puzzles, a scenario that was practice, training, not just her being next to him in close quarters with nothing to do but talk and wait for the next day to begin.

And yet, here they are in the Rexford. No more practice tonight, no more puzzles. Just... company again.

She opens the door and her spare shirt’s sticking to the still damp parts of her shoulders, weighed down by dripping hair. He’s glad to see the wig gone, the makeup too. She hadn’t liked wearing it anyway.

He falls back onto his bed and lets the blankets  _poof_ along his sides. “You’ve got to stop singing,” he tells her, staring at the ceiling. Too easy to stare at her—that grin of hers, the way her hair’s already full of frizz from the Wasteland heat.

She tosses a bar of soap onto his stomach. “Sorry, sorry! I know.”

“I’m sure Hancock’s heard you before; if he’d heard you just now, you’d be blown.”

She  _tsks_  at him, probably shaking her finger. “Deacon, how  _dirty_.”

He holds back his grin; this is serious. “Your  _cover_ would be blown.”

He can hear her rustling around off to his right, digging through her bag, probably going through all the crap she picked up in that last gutted house. “Hancock’s not stupid,” she says. “He knows when to keep his mouth shut.”

“Hancock’s not the point. You’ve got to stop falling into old habits.” What gets him, really, is that she knows what he’s getting at. They have this talk all the time.

“I know, I know. I’m sorry,” she finally concedes, sincerely this time. “I’ll remember next time. Promise.”

 _You won’t,_ and again, he holds back his grin. “I’m going to clean this lovely super-mutant-in-a-bar smell off myself,” he says, rising from his bed and looking to her, sitting on her own mattress and rustling through her bag (just like he’d thought) and lining up her newly acquired junk neatly beside her. He likes old-world gadgets as much as the next discerning gentleman but there’s junk and then there’s  _junk._ Plus, her filing system makes no sense. He’s been trying to figure it out for weeks but it looks like he’ll have to suck it up and just ask her.

 _Just ask her. What a strategy._ He’s... pretty sure she told him the truth earlier, about the name she picked. She’s not very good at lying, anyway. Only seems to be able to do it by omission. Not the best skill for an intel gatherer to lack but she makes up for it in other ways.

“I could just disguise my voice, maybe?” She’s not serious, just talking. It’s... weird, really, how she just talks to talk sometimes. People do that, sure, but not with him. He’s never around anyone long enough for that. Not when he’s  _him_ anyway. “Think I could sound like Magnolia?”

“Not a chance in hell,” he says, shutting the bathroom door behind him.

“Well, damn, don’t be gentle,” she calls.

 _Oh._ He supposes, twenty seconds too late to take it back, that it may have sounded like an insult.  _But it wasn’t. God, it wasn’t._

...

[12.09.2287 // 03:05 // Goodneighbor]

She waits ‘til she can hear him splashing water in the sink. Only when she’s sure she’s got at least a good ten minutes does she pluck a smoke from her 200 year old carton of Marlboro Reds and light it up.

She inhales deep on her cigarette and it sets her into a coughing fit. But she keeps pulling, keeps the end of it burning hot and finishes it off quick as she can; it’s not about savouring, about enjoyment or relaxation. She just needs this room to smell like smoke. She puts it out against the wall, flicks the leftover away from her and doesn’t bother to pick it up. The whole damned Commonwealth is dirty; the world’s way past “no littering” signs and federal fines and recycling bins. Fuck cigarette butts in shitty hotels with histories that used to mean something.  _And fuck organized piles of salvage,_ she thinks, sweeping her arm across the bed and knocking her broken and jumbled treasures to the floor. Things aren’t that simple anymore; there’s no way to pile things up in categories, no way to differentiate from the parts of her that are hurt and the parts that aren’t yet.

She lights up again, hears Deacon turn off the faucet. At least some places have managed to get the water back up and running. Goddamn miracle, really. This place—the whole Commonwealth—it’s a dream. She’s more free here than she ever was  _before._ But look at all she’s lost to get here.

Exhaustion is rushing up to meet her from the dark place where it lives and she’s not ready yet, to sleep, to surrender to more dreams that are never what she wants them to be. So she takes a few quick drags, puffs hasty and sloppy and coughing on her smoke, making the cherry burn bright in the dark. She lifts the cigarette away from her lips and presses it against her arm.

Just a few more minutes of  _awake._

She imagines an audible sizzle, smoke rising like a beckoning finger in the air, her skin turning as bright and red and shiny as the fire itself. When she can smell the burn of flesh, she finally pulls it away, stares at the wall across from her with half-shut eyes and apathy. The sharpness dulls away and she wraps her secret injury in a length of bandage, properly coated in meds and disinfectant. Then she rolls her sleeves back down to hide the evidence of her high and smokes the rest of her cigarette until Deacon comes out of the bathroom.

“Like a pre-war spa,” she says, passing him the last bit of the stick.

“What’s a spa?” He takes a couple pulls and finishes it off, holding out his hand for another. She complies.

“Nevermind,” she says. “It’d just make you jealous. So what’s on the schedule tomorrow?”

“We’re heading to the Memory Den,” he says, lighting up. “Talk to the good doctor, clear the road, maybe be there for the send-off.”

She nods. Not so complicated. And, happily, it requires no wigs.

Deacon looks down at the jumbled pile of junk she’d swept to the floor and she readies herself for a half-hearted chastisement but he doesn’t bring it up. Instead, he heads to his bed and jerks back the blanket.

“You know,” he says, wearing that conspiratorial grin. “I had a pet yao guai once.”

“You liar.” She can’t stop the stupid smile though.

He gasps, brings his hand to his heart. “You don’t want to hear the story?”

She rolls her eyes but she leans forward anyway, resting her weight on the heels of her hands. “Tell me.”

...

[12.09.2287 // 17:00 // Malden Center]

If there was  _one thing_ Deacon was sure he’d never experience again, it was heartbreak.

The Commonwealth can’t beat you with a stick it doesn’t have and Deacon’s made damn sure that particular stick doesn’t exist. After a while, he didn’t even have to make the effort—things stopped being real, attachment stopped trying to happen at all, there was nothing left of whoever he was or is or ever would be to get attached.

And even now, in the middle of the street with his heart in pieces in her hands, it’s not attachment. It’s not him. It’s just... her. And he doesn’t know why and that’s frustrating.

“Are you alright?” He’s afraid to touch her. He feels like he ought to, like he should put a hand on her shoulder or something (that’s what people do, that’s what people do) but he stays in place, two feet behind her, watching her shoulders shake with the sobs she hides behind her hands. _What a stupid fucking thing to ask._

The bigger part of him—the part that is always working, always watching, always filing things away—is glancing up and down the street, through windows and broken door frames, looking for whatever is lurking around to kill them. There’s always something there. Always something somewhere. He should tell her this isn’t the place, but she knows.

And he’s never seen her really cry before.

But then she’s on him like fury, too close to his face, her hands in fists at her sides, and he thinks  _we’re both going to die_ because she’s going to kill him and he can’t focus on anything but the angry scowl she wears, can’t take his eyes away from hers to sweep the street for oncoming death.

“Did you know?” It’s not even a question, really. Whisper asks few questions; she makes observations. “About H2. Did you know?”

A lie: I didn’t know. Result: forgiveness, yes, but now he knows less than he’s let on he knows. He’s supposed to be HQ’s #1, supposed to be able to help her get used to things. How can she trust him if he doesn’t have the answers to the most important questions? _She shouldn’t trust me anyway._

The truth: I did know. Result: likely a slap across the face, but the chance to apologize. The question is will this drive her closer or farther away? Some agents can work for organizations that betray them for the cause, but he knows Whisper well enough already to know that she can’t do that. She’s not here for the cause; she’s here for her kid.

“Not exactly,” he settles on. Her voice echoes in his head: _liar, liar._ Sometimes he teases her; sometimes it’s not teasing though, sometimes it’s just... him. But she never means it when she says it. She should mean it. Hell, if she said it right now, she probably would. Wouldn’t come out nearly so sweet and careless as it had last night.

Her eyes are hard. She doesn’t even blink. He’d better get this one right.

“I know lots of them choose to have their memories altered, and I knew we were probably cleaning house for someone fresh off the table, but I didn’t know it was him. If I’d bothered to think about it, I probably would’ve made the connection, but I didn’t. I’m sorry.” And he means that. (He thinks he does. He feels like he does. He wants to drag his thumb across her cheek, wipe away the dirt and her sadness; isn’t that what being sorry feels like?)

He’d known her first round with this particular kind of job would be telling; everyone has their own way of looking at it. But still, he’d never thought she’d get so attached. She’d only spent the better part of a night with H2, and most of that not even talking with him. She’d hardly known him at all. So he asks her.

She rubs her arms with her hands. The Commonwealth is never cold this time of day, but still, he can see the chillflesh rising.

“It’s not that,” she says. She lets her eyes wander away, softer already for having not been betrayed. She thinks. “He was alone. He was scared and he was alone with it, hoping just another stranger was telling him the truth. I—” Her head snaps up, her hands are at her sides. She’s putting herself back on track. Breaking his heart again.

He follows along, a step behind her, letting her have what little privacy she can out here.

“You know we have to destroy that holotape,” he says quietly.

She only nods. He watches the way her hair slides up and down against her leather-clad shoulders, thinks of his hands tying it up for her, a singular and pitiful comfort. Thinks of his hands staying there.

They should get back to HQ. As quickly as possible.

...

[12.10.2287 // 11:00 // Railroad HQ]

He finds a happy medium between overwhelming boredom and strategic cockiness when he takes a seat in Des’ “office.”

“How’d she do?” Des doesn’t even look up from whatever she’s doing. Fine by him. He leans back, gets comfy, sprawls out as much as he can in this crappy metal chair.

“Golden,” he says, smiling wide. “It is as I predicted: my protégé is almost as smart as her teacher.”

Des rolls her eyes and takes a puff of her cigarette. “No problems then?”

“Not a one,” he says, crossing one ankle over his knee. “She’s clear for solo work, Des, really. And, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to that myself.”  _Even if you do mind,_ he thinks.  _I can’t take much more of this._

She laughs a little; he’s never been one for partners, after all. “Is it that bad?”

“That bad,” he agrees. _(Liar, liar.) It’s so good, Des. It’s so, so good._ “It’s not her; she’s fine, like I said. Does good work. But—”

“But you’re the most antisocial bastard I’ve ever met,” she finishes for him.

He just grins. Mission accomplished.

“Well,” she says, finally rising from her seat and coming around her desk. She leans against it, flicking the ashes of her cigarette onto the floor without care. Hell, they’ve already desecrated these catacombs, why worry about a few stray ashes? “You’ve got good timing. If you really think she’s up for it, I have a solo job in mind for her already, but I’ll need a day or so to finish setting it up. As for you, I’m waiting for a report. When it comes, I’ll send you in for the follow up. Sound good?”

“Sounds great.”

She nods, returning to her makeshift desk and wordlessly dismissing him.

That done, he heads back out into the main chamber. Glory claps him on the back.

“Good run?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Calm as a breeze.” He sees her, Whisper, across the room. Tom’s handing off another of his terra-something-or-others. Whisper’s nodding, her grin more genuine than it had been when they’d arrived. “I’ll, uh, be right back, Glory.”

“My run went great,” she calls after him. “Thanks for asking.”

He puts up his hand, waving behind him. She throws a wad of paper at the back of his head.

When he reaches Whisper, he taps her on the shoulder, ducking down and to the left when she turns, so she’s left staring at the empty space. “Setting up another of Tom’s babies?”

She turns again—finds him this time, thumps him on the arm for her trouble—and says “Yeah. Wanna come?”

_Yes._

“I don’t know,” he says, drawing it out. “Got so much to do here. Glory’s missed me something terrible. PAM wanted me to rewire some circuits or something—”

“FALSE,” echoes through the hall, way back from PAM’s little den of firepower.

“But I guess I can manage a quick one with you,” he finishes, in spite of the rude interruption.

There’s that laugh again: her putting her arms around her stomach, doubling over and red in the face. She laughs so loud, several agents turn to watch them. “Do you—do you even hear yourself sometimes?”

_What—oh. Oh, ha ha. Smooth._

He just rolls his eyes. “Come on, Agent Loudmouth.”

...

[12.10.2287 // 19:40 // Park Street Station]

He watches her stand on the very tips of her toes to secure a board across the door. He could help, but then he’d sacrifice his evening entertainment (her language gets so colourful when she can’t reach something) so he opts to sit and watch instead, unable to stop the nervous fidgeting of his hands.

If he’s being honest with himself—which he does not do; why’s he doing that?—he might, just maybe, be a teensy-tiny little bit anxious about her going on a job without him. _Maybe._ And only a little bit. A microscopic amount. Less than that, even.

It’s not that she can’t handle herself, not at all. Hell, she’d done a fine job long before he’d shown up and she’s saved his ass four times by her own count (it’s actually been six, but she doesn’t need to know that).

It’s just... what  _if_. What if she falls into a pit crawling with deathclaws? What if someone’s found out the code phrase and turns her in? What if the package is actually an agent and not a runaway?

If shit goes bad, she can handle it. He knows. But what if.

_Just gonna be a simple run. Probably just gonna be checking in on a safehouse. Probably Northeast, probably near Malden, no big deal._

Hell, more than likely she’ll get held up trying to save every single man, woman, and child between here and her target.  _That’s her damn problem,_ he thinks, watching her finish her barricade across the door (it’s a subway car this time, not a bad place to sleep, really).  _She’s too sincere, too willing to help, too willing to trust._

She trusts the Railroad, after all. Trusts him.

“Not exactly,” he’d told her yesterday. It wasn’t the truth— _never fucking is with me_ —but it wasn’t a lie, not... completely. She’d not doubted him, not questioned him any further. Hell, she’d been vulnerable in every sense, cried, left watching their surroundings to him, assumed he was—

_And who the hell takes a liar to watch their back anyway? If she’d gotten killed in the last few weeks, it wouldn’t have been my fault. I told her up front. I said it. I did. I’m a liar._

But even as he argues with himself, something sour pits in his stomach at the thought of  _if she’d gotten killed._

“Hey, come over here,” he says, when she’s done and looking over her handiwork.

She sits across from him, props her feet up on his seat and nudges the inside of his thigh with the toe of her boot. “What’s up?”

It’s a trick he’s pulled before, though all those guys are dead now. He hands her a folded slip of paper, readies the script in his head. “Don’t open it,” he says quickly, when she moves to do just that. It’s gotta hit just right, gotta be... sincere.

“I have to tell you something.”

“Ok,” she says, paper unopened in her hand and eyes on him like he’s worth it.

He almost backs out. It’s that  _regret_ again, that doing this job means  _being_ this job and he just wants her to be her (fuck all if he knows why). But she’s here now, she’s in this now, so she’s got to change, got to be  _not her,_ at least a little. Because otherwise... There’s danger outside the Railroad, danger that comes from being part of it, but there’s danger _inside_ the Railroad too.

“I’m a synth,” he says, without pause or gentleness. She needs that sometimes, he’s noticed: blunt  _honesty._ He watches her face, watches for the corners of her mouth to turn down or for her eyes to wander away or for her brows to come together. None of that happens.

“Ok,” she says again, waiting for him to go on, waiting for there to be more. And, oh, there is more.

“Are you ok with that? Does that change... anything? With us?” He leans back, away from her, when he asks that. That wasn’t part of the script. That wasn’t part of the plan, wasn’t part of the test.

“What? No. Of course not.” And she doesn’t even hesitate, doesn’t even think about it. It doesn’t surprise him, not really. From all he’s seen of her, from the way she dotes on Nick and Hancock and even her Mister Handy, the way she and Glory get on so well, he’d not really expected her to respond any other way. Yet, he’s relieved. _Not that it matters,_ he reminds himself. _“I’m a synth” isn’t the part that’s true._

“What I just gave you,” he says, gesturing to the paper in her hand. “That’s my recall code. If you say that to me, I revert back to  _factory settings,_ as it were.” This is the part where he says  _I can fight like a courser if you feed me that code, get you out of a sticky situation._ But instead... no, for her, it needs to be something else, something with more hurt in it. “Whatever I knew about the Institute before, I’ll remember if you read me that code. I figure—I figure you should have it.”

 _It’s all a lie. I’m a liar. But if it was real,_ he promises her.  _If it was real, I’d say the same._

“Why are you giving me this?”

 _In case you need it,_ he’s supposed to say. “In case you need me. In case... for your son.” He looks at his hands, sitting useless in his lap, and her feet propped up next to him. She’s so close. Too close. _Liar, liar._

Hell, he’s gone off-script already, may as well... He shouldn’t. It fucks everything up, detracts from the point. But he’s curious. He needs to make her a puzzle again, like everything else.

“Do me a favour,” he says, still looking at his hands. “Don’t read it unless you have to. For all I know, you read that and ‘Deacon’s’ lights go off; Designation Whatever-Whatever turns back on and your favourite asshole over here doesn’t come back.” _And I am your favourite, right?_

When it was Nick—back in Goodneighbor, in the Memory Den, when the choice was Shaun or Nick, she wanted Nick. And he still doesn’t know why she did what she did, but he wonders, now that it’s Shaun or “Deacon,” what her choice will be.

“I won’t read it,” she promises quietly.

He can’t look at her. It’s something in the way she says it, maybe, or something in the way she makes him tired of being all these people he isn’t.

 _Fucking piece of shit. Dangling her son over her head like that._ He doesn’t know why this bothers him so much. It never bothered him before. She’s not so special—she’s just a person, just as skilled and flawed and talkative as every other person he’s ever had the displeasure of working with, whatever side of the fight they were on.

He hears her flick open her lighter and he thinks of how much he could use a smoke.

_What is it? That she’s kind? Sure, she’s got a sweet streak in her as long as her kill count but I’ve met nicer people._

The fire glows warm and orange against his hands. He hopes there’s nothing lurking about farther in the tunnel, hopes nothing can see the pinprick light in the dark.

 _That she’s kind of weird? Man, she_ is _weird, but Tom’s in a whole other league. She’s got nothing on some of the people I know._

Smoke.

 _Can’t be those shitty jokes. “Hey Deacon, what did the rockstar name his pet radscorpian? Sting! You get it?” No. It_ cannot _be the jokes._

He looks up at her—there’s got to be a goddamn answer somewhere in those eyes of hers, in that grin—and his little slip of paper, his recall code, is burning in her hands.

“What are you doing?” That was too loud. And too loud, too, is the little shriek that escapes him when he reaches out and grabs it, burns his fingertips on the blackening, curling edges.

“I don’t need this, Deacon,” she says.

 _Fuck sincerity,_  he decides. Because she failed the test.

And he’s relieved. He’s not supposed to feel that. Because he failed too—he botched the test, made it personal, and that’s not allowed to happen. It’s not just a Railroad Rule; it’s a Deacon rule, whoever the hell  _Deacon_  is. And he doesn’t even fucking know why.

“Yes you do,” he tells her, patting out the burning edges. “You need it the most.”

“I don’t want—”

But he stops her, unfolds it and shoves it, still smoking, into her face. Part of it’s burnt off, but he pushes it toward her ‘til she takes it. It’s instant, her figuring it out.

_You can’t trust everyone._

“It was a lie,” she says, still looking at it. He may as well have handed her a bucket of mirelurk intestines, the way she’s looking at the thing in her hands.

_Yes. I’m a liar._

“Everyone is going to lie to you,” he says. “Or maybe they won’t. But you’re—”

_You’re... Hell, I don’t know but whatever you are, I don’t want you to die._

“But you need to understand that: you really can’t trust everyone. Anyone.”

_You can’t stop and fix wagon wheels and believe people when they can’t pay you. You can’t just do what you’re told for your son’s sake, for the Minutemen or the Railroad or me. You can’t trust us. We use people. We all do._

She looks up at him now, and he’s not sure what he expected to see. Anger, maybe. Hurt. Something. But she’s as empty as the Commonwealth sky. “Thanks for the lesson,  _Sir_.”

Then she gets up and walks to the other end of the train car, carrying his lie crumpled in her fist and leaving the sting of  _sir_ behind.

...

[12.11.2287 // 13:50 // Old North Church]

She doesn’t talk to him at all the next day while they set up MILA and head back to HQ. They don’t run into anything messy either, so he doesn’t even have the excuse of combat to get her attention.

Why’s he care so damn much?

This is beyond the necessity of getting along with his co-workers. And he can’t stop the pure and driving  _want_ to just take it all back. But it had to be done. It did. And he’s not sorry. Why can’t she stop being such a child? She’s not the first person he’s ever lied to and he’s not the first person to ever lie to her.  _I’ve got nothing to apologize for. I didn’t shatter her goddamn innocence._

“Aren’t you even going to check if I’m still alive back here? I could’ve been eaten by a super mutant.”

She doesn’t even flinch. “Are you still alive?” she says dully.

“Mostly. I almost fell to my death, earlier, though. Tripped over a loose piece of concrete,” he says, in that pathetic voice that always draws a laugh from her.

But she doesn’t bite, so he keeps on. “My ankle’s killing me.”

Nothing.

“Maybe we could stop for a minute?”

Nope, still walking.

“Just for a quick minute, then. I think I’ve sprained it.”

Not a word.

“Come on, you’re really not going to talk to me?”

Apparently, no, she’s really not.

 _What other option was there? We tell her to jump and she does._ It’s great to have an agent that follows orders, but she’s not just— He’s not sorry. He can’t regret it. He can’t. Should’ve done it a long time ago, he just...

A long and silent half hour later, they arrive at HQ. She has a quick look around then ducks inside the church and he follows, feeling far more dejected than he has any right to feel and than she has any right to make him feel. It’s ridiculous.

He stops her just outside the door of the tombs, reaches out and grabs her wrist—her skin is colder than he’d expected—and she doesn’t jerk away but she doesn’t turn to look at him either.

“I didn’t mean to—to hurt you,” he says. Isn’t that what this is? Isn’t that what he’s supposed to say now?

“Right,” she says, and god, the venom in her voice. “Right, you just wanted to teach me a lesson. That it?”

“Yes!” He pleads with her to understand. He was helping. He was trying, anyway. “I just wanted to—”

“You don’t get to teach that lesson, Deacon. And I don’t need you to. I’m not naive; I’m not stupid.”

“I know that; I don’t think—” he tries, but she turns around to face him and her wrist slips out of his grasp.

“Just leave me alone.” She shoves him away from her and walks off, pushing open the door to HQ and not looking back at him when Drummer Boy runs up and guides her toward the back of the room for who-knows-what now.

He just sucks on his teeth and nods. “Yeah,” he says to himself. “Ok.”

...

[12.11.2287 // 14:45 // Railroad HQ]

She’s mad.

Some days, she doesn’t know how she feels, can’t find the lines between grief and frustration and relief. She can’t put a name to the way she feels when she brings the burning end of a cigarette to her arm or how she’d felt when she left that Vault and civilian family life with it. Some feelings are too mixed up, too heavy, too wide for her to do anything so mundane as name them or understand them; sometimes all she can do is  _feel_ them and let them wash over her, wait for them to pass, piece herself back together afterwards.

But other days, days like today, her feelings are so simple.

She’s really fucking mad.

And she just wants to stay that way for a while, but Deacon... goddamn him and his stupid face that’s getting so easy to read. Or maybe it’s not easy to read. Maybe all he really does is lie all the damn time.

Maybe it bothers her more than she’d thought it would. It had almost been a relief in the beginning: she wouldn’t have to worry about sharing any secrets, his or her own. She could just do a job, fight a fight, shoot, win, not have to think. But then he’d started doing that  _thing,_ trying to piece her together with every word she’d said, every gesture she’d made.

_And how the hell does lying to me teach me that other people are going to lie to me? How fucking stupid does he think I am? I’m not stupid, I just don’t want to—I’m just doing what I have to do to get my son. I’m following him around, aren’t I? Helping runaways and making contacts and shooting at decoys. Why’s he got to make it complicated? Why’s he got to—_

But maybe it’s not that. Maybe it’s that she  _did_ trust him, despite all his bullshit and twisted up words. He lies all the time, just... she usually knows what he’s saying underneath all that. But not this time—this time it’d just... _hurt._ Maybe she was getting too used to having a partner again. Maybe she _wanted_ him to piece her together. Maybe she...

“Oh just fuck it.”

Drummer Boy looks up, stopping mid-sentence, and she realizes she wasn’t listening at all.

“That’s probably not the best way to go about this particular job,” he says.

“Sorry. Sorry, I was...”

“Not listening to me,” he finishes for her.

“Not what I was gonna say, but ok,  _yes._ ” She lets out a deep breath. This is exactly why she’d missed her old work; it didn’t require this kind of thinking. Sir would point and she would shoot and her team got fed. Simple. And her partner—he never twisted her up in knots like this; he was on her side, she was on his. There was no reason to question, no uncertainty to throw her off in the middle of a fight, no doubt wriggling its way into the back of her mind during a briefing. The only one who ever tried to fuck her up on purpose was Sir. And looking back on it... she hates that bastard.

Maybe Desdemona’s right. Maybe it  _is_ time for some solo work.

“So, where am I going, Drumms?”

“Back to Cambridge,” he says. “This is gonna be a big one.”

...

[12.11.2287 // 15:05 // Railroad HQ]

Des gives him his location—a dead drop right outside Diamond City, not too much of a trip—and then dismisses him. He’s sure she noticed Whisper’s bad mood and his silence; he’s sure she knows  _something_ is up, but she doesn’t mention it. Not her job, really. So long as it doesn’t impact their work (and it won’t), it’s not her problem to sort out. He’s glad of that, although... well, maybe having a real person to help him sort this out wouldn’t be so unwelcome. Still, Des isn’t... well, she’s not at the top of his list of people he wants to confide in about interpersonal issues. In fact, he doesn’t really have a list like that.

Maybe that’s part of his problem. His big, complicated, stupid problem.

He shoves a chair out of his way with a screech as he leaves Des’ make-shift office area.  _Dammit._ He’ll just try again. He’ll just tell her he’s sorry. He’ll just say it:  _I don’t know why I get so frustrated around you. I just want—I just want..._

But what the hell is it that he wants?

_I want to keep working with you._

_I want you to keep singing when I tell you not to._

_I want to help but I don’t think I know how. I want you to tell me how._

_I want you to know it’s been a long time since I wanted to call anybody my friend. I want you to care about that._

He scans the room for her, but she’s not here. Usually she goes straight to Tom after a run (hell, if he tinkers with that gun any more than he already has the thing’ll shoot mini-nukes and sing  _Crawl Out Through the Fallout_ on command). But she’s not anywhere, it seems—not in the main room or with PAM or Glory or taking a nap in the back or shooting at those cardboard cutout gunners by the chalkboard. She’s...

“You looking for your new partner-in-crime?” Glory claps him on the back and throws an arm around his shoulder, steers him toward the table and what he hopes is a warm plate of food.

“Yeah,” he says, taking a seat at the table with her and peeling back some foil.  _Mole rat. Great...This day just gets better and better._ But he tries not to sneer at it. Food’s food and at least it isn’t grilled bug parts.

“She already left. Don’t know much, just that Des sent her to Cambridge.”

“Cambridge?” What the hell’s in Cambridge? They don’t usually get drops there—kind of a hot spot for ferals.

Glory just shrugs and sticks a fork in his food, prodding at it like she thinks it’s as unappetizing as he does. “I wouldn’t worry—”

“I’m  _not_  worried,” he says quickly. _Liar, liar._

She just smirks at him and flicks her hair out of her eyes. “Probably be back in a couple days. Cambridge isn’t that far.”

Back in a couple days. She’ll be back in a couple days. That’s fine. Gives him time to think about his words, get them right. It’s different—harder—when the words are really his. When was the last time he even talked to someone as himself? It’s a part he’s not sure how to play.

He lets out a breath and tries to ignore the look on Glory’s face.  _She’ll be back in a couple days._

...

[12.20.2287 // 18:45 // Railroad HQ]

She isn’t back.

He got back from Diamond City  _six days_ ago. Six. And she’s not back.

He’s pacing. PAM ignores him; seems she’s the only one around here who cares about preserving his dignity (“FALSE,” she’d say, if she could hear his thoughts) because Glory sure as hell doesn’t.

“Damn, brother, you’ve got it bad,” she says, arms crossed over her chest and legs stretched out in front of her.

Deacon thinks she looks far too comfortable, all things considered. She’s even got that shit-eating grin on her face and he just— _ugh_ , he just wants to throw something.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, narrowing his eyes at her and returning to his pacing.

“And I don’t know if you’re lying or stupid,” she shoots back.

He ignores her.

“Cambridge is only two days away, tops,” he says, thinking aloud more to himself than to Glory (who is just too fucking amused) or PAM (who probably isn’t even listening). “There’s no way she shouldn’t be back. Are there any known super mutant hives between here and there that haven’t been cleaned out? She’s not so good with them on her own. And if she ran into a bunch of them—”

“Damn, Deacon, she’s fine. You need to relax,” Glory laughs.

“I don’t—”

“Yes, you do. She’s a big girl, you know. Pretty damn good with a gun. Hell, you’re the one taught her to run jobs anyway.”

_But did I? Yeah, she’s good with a gun, good in a fight. But she sings all the damn time. Can’t keep quiet. Can’t blend in to save her life—_

_I’m not stupid,_ she’d said.  _I’m not naive. I don’t need you to teach me that._

“Shit.”

“Oho,” Glory says, sitting up straight and pointing at him. “I just saw something, buddy. I just saw something click together in that weird, wire crossed brain of yours! What’d you figure out?”

“I’m an ass,” he says. _And a liar._

“Oh.” She sounds far less excited now. “Well, that too, I guess. Sometimes. We all have our moments, man.”

He leaves the room, and Glory doesn’t follow him, either because he’s lost all his entertainment value or because she knows what he’s doing before he does.

“Des,” he says, reaching toward her like he can pull her to him from across the room. “Des, where’d you send her?” _Her first job—just something quick, just something simple._ But she should’ve been back already. There’s this feeling in his gut.

“Whisper? Cambridge.”

“No, I know,” he says. “But what for?”

She flicks her cigarette. She shouldn’t tell him. Not his job, not his info. That’s how this place stays together, but... Hell, he must look even more of a mess than he feels because she tips her head toward her back room office and shuts the door behind them when he follows her inside.

“With the Brotherhood making their move, I felt it was important that we get a handle on their operations. We need to know what they’re doing here, what kind of arsenal they’ve got, how high we are on their priority list.”

But Deacon’s already figured it out. He’s going to throw up.

“And she knows that Paladin guy,” he concludes.

“Danse, yes. I believe you were aware that she initially refused his offer for membership.”

“Yes,” he says weakly.

“I’ve had her accept. She is now a sleeper agent.”

So she’s gone dark. Surrounded by enemies in power armour with giant guns and bad attitudes. And for who knows how long? Yep, definitely going to throw up.

“Are you sure she’s... the right person for this job?” He’s got faith in her, sure. In certain areas.

“She’s got an in no one else has,” Des says. When she looks at him, her eyes are sharp, watching for any crack in his armour, any hole in his story. “And you assured me she was ready for solo work. Are you telling me she’s a liability?”

 _Shit._ “No,” he says, calm as can be. “Of course not.” He knows very well what will happen if Des and PAM decide Whisper’s a risk, rather than an asset.

Des doesn’t look away, doesn’t soften. She’s waiting for a slip, for any uncertainty. “Then what’s the problem?”

“Just—just why didn’t you tell me, Des? She’s my recruit.” _My partner._ But he knows why. Maybe he needs Des to remind him. Maybe he needs it to be shoved back down his throat, ground up and sprinkled in his food, injected straight into his veins.

“Deacon,” she says, and that’s it, right there. That’s the tone of voice he needs. “Whisper is not your responsibility. Your responsibility—and hers too—is the Railroad. Period. Remember that.”

“Yes ma’am,” he says, like a proper soldier should. But he doesn’t feel it. That outer shell, that bit of him that formed the line, the chasm, the fucking abyss between  _work_  and  _not work_ —it’s already started melting away. And what the hell’s he supposed to do? What’s he supposed to say that’s not going to make this worse for all of them?

“You got a job for me?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The lyrics ("I lived off rats and toads...") are from Ally Kerr's Sore Feet Song.  
> And she inherited her potty mouth from me: I'm a bad OC mom and I have mild road rage and I yell obscenities at my radio while in heavy traffic. And sometimes at my toaster.


	3. Ad Victoriam

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tens infiltrates the Brotherhood of Steel (and is, generally, a poor excuse for a spy); meanwhile, Deacon worries (and is, generally, a poor excuse for a liar). Also starring: Danse, Desdemona, & Railroad Conspiracy Theories.

[12.17.2287 // 10:00 // Fort Strong]

She’s never been in a vertibird before. A plane, sure. When Sir sent the team out—for info or people or to get rid of problems—they sometimes took a small private plane. But a tiny plane with no windows is not the same as a vertibird with open sides and wind rushing in all around her, flinging her hair into her face while she aims a minigun at a dozen super mutants rampaging down below her.

It’s not that she _enjoys_ killing mutants; in fact, the sons-of-bitches are a pain in the ass. They seem to just seek her out and then practically eat her ammo like breakfast cereal. But when she was Tens, when she was with her team, blowing up buildings from six streets down or taking a shot through a scope or running surveillance for one of the others—she always knew the risk. Do or Die. Those were the rules: Mission Accomplished or Killed in Action. Mission Accomplished or Suicide on Discovery. Mission Accomplished or Executed for Failure.

Fear was her pulse. Adrenaline, her self-awareness. She felt it, always; couldn’t remember what it was to exist without that buzz in her veins.

And when they dumped her off in Massachusetts, made her a fucking civilian with a job and a dog and a husband, they tranquilized her, made her walk around in a haze. She was supposed to be relieved, supposed to be “free,” supposed to be happy, but she wasn’t. She was just sleep-walking. They made Tens into Jane Smith, into Nate’s wife, Shaun’s mom, that new woman on the block who makes the worst cupcakes for the bakesale because she doesn’t know there’s more than one kind of flour, doesn’t know what it means to “fold in the butter.” There was no Sir, no finger pointing her team forward, no consequences for being late to an appointment or buying the wrong brand of spaghetti sauce or not knowing how to run a dishwasher.

The Wasteland isn’t quite the same as things were before all that, but it’s close—full of monsters, full of things and people that want to kill her, full of consequences for every single action from picking the wrong shirt to shooting the wrong target. The Wasteland wakes her up.

And the Brotherhood—well, Maxson’s not _quite_ Sir. Maxson’s too caught up in his cause and Tens isn’t here to fight someone’s fight, but he’s got the finger-pointing down at least, knows how to make a killer kill, though he sure likes to pretend he isn’t one himself.

But that doesn’t matter. She’s Tens. She’s a tool for the Railroad, pretending to be a tool for the Brotherhood. She’s shooting at angry, green not-people who toss boulders at the spinning blades of their transport and if she doesn’t kill, she dies. She’s not Jane Smith here, not anyone’s neighbour or wife or mother. She’s Tens and she’s a tool and she’s in a fucking vertibird, _awake._

“We should get one of these, Dea—”

No. That’s wrong. She hopes Danse can’t hear her over the engine, over the blades chopping through the air, over the sound of the guns firing.

She keeps doing that, turning around to tell him something before she remembers he isn’t with her. She has to be more careful. It’s just that she sort of misses him, jackass that he was before she left. And it’d be more fun with her—no. That’s wrong too. Maybe. Deacon isn’t her partner. Maybe she’d thought... Doesn’t matter. _This_ is where she is now. _This_ is what she’s doing. _This_ is who she’s with. The Brotherhood, Danse.

She doesn’t know how to be a spy. But Deacon taught her some things, at least. _Just be yourself,_ he’d said. _Only a little different._ So she doesn’t know how to be a spy; she knows how to be a killer and that’s what the Brotherhood wants from her.

“I’m bringing us down in front of the base, soldier,” Danse calls back to her.

She likes Danse. Sort of. Likes him much better now that he doesn’t call her “civilian” anymore. She’d wanted to claw his eyes out for that, wanted to drag him out of his power armour and show him just how _civilian_ her hand-to-hand training was, wanted to tell him how easy it would be for her to put a bullet in his head from 2,000 yards on a foggy day. She didn’t want to kill him, just wanted him to know she _could._ But now he usually calls her “soldier,” and that’s what she is here, in the Brotherhood. It’s what she was before, too. Deacon calls her “Whisper” and it’s not the name that bothers her. Maybe not.

Sometimes Danse just calls her “Tens,” her name—when they’re off duty or he’s not so fully focused on rank and file and decorum. It’s kind of nice, to hear her name. Kind of nice to be _her_ and not just _soldier,_ or _agent,_ or _wife, mommy, neighbour._ She’s never been _just_ Tens, not without all the things that came with that. But Deacon doesn’t call her Tens, not even when they’re off-duty (they’re _never_ really off-duty, anyway).

She keeps firing, taking down the last mutant in her sights as the bird thuds onto the ground. The engine cuts and the blades slow and Danse hops down, waving her behind him as he pulls a gun from his back.

“I hate mutants,” he says and her stomach turns. He’d told her the story—his friend being infected, that whole team murdered—but even still, the venom in Danse’s voice... She can’t help but remember the word “turned,” didn’t know before he told her that this... this virus, infection, whatever it is—she didn’t know it had been done to them, didn’t know they were people before they were...

She shakes her head, swallows back the bile rising in her throat, and pretends he didn’t say anything. This can’t be about Danse—this is about the Brotherhood because this is about the Railroad because this is about her son. Right? Yeah.

She pulls her own gun to aim and surveys the yard between them and the front of the fort. The adrenaline makes her fingers buzz, makes every sound and smell and sight just a bit louder, sharper, brighter.

She’s awake. That’s all that matters.

...

[12.21.2287 // 23:54 // Dugout Inn]

The wheels of the Railroad have been turning for a while by the time Deacon realizes he’s fucked up.

Glory thinks he’s in love (she’s wrong but she’s disgustingly pleased with the idea). Worse, Des thinks he’s blinded by it (she’s wrong too, but she’s most definitely _not_ pleased with the idea).

He’s fucked up. He’s gonna get her killed.

Hell, maybe he already has.

Tens and Whisper are not supposed to be the same person. That’s not how Railroad agents work. And that was his _job_ : observe, learn, change. It’s like that with every agent they recruit. Observe the person ( _check_ ), learn the person ( _check_ ), change the person ( _but she’s so... and I don’t... can’t we just..._ ).

He shouldn’t have been so easy on her, shouldn’t have ignored all those little red flags—listening to her sing or sharing her smokes or laughing at her jokes. She just—no, that’s not true. _He_ should’ve fucking buckled down, should’ve _made_ her listen, _taught_ her to be someone else, anyone else, just not herself.

He’d thought she could run solo but— _no,_ that’s not true. She _can_ run solo, has been running solo. _He_ shouldn’t have run scared, shouldn’t have told Des she was ready before she was, shouldn’t have tried so damn hard to find a way out just because he’d started looking at her hair and her fingers and her grin. He shouldn’t have been looking at all.

He leans forward, presses his forehead against the wall of his tiny rented room. It smells like smoke; of course it does, doesn’t everything? But it bugs him anyway, makes him want to burn the damn place down. She’d kill him. She’d drag her ass off that Brotherhood airship and she’d kill him.

_“You burned down the Dugout? That’s my favourite bar!”_

_“They’re all your favourite bar.”_

_“And you burned one down!”_

If only that would actually work. _Sorry, Vadim, gotta set the place on fire, gotta save my girl._

Deacon hasn’t needed to draw a line between Deacon the agent and Deacon the man for a while. Doesn’t remember enough of the man to bother with a line. ( _No, that’s not true._ ) Then Whisper comes along— _Tens_ comes alone—ruins his whole goddamn thing with her singing and her dumb jokes and her fucking _waffle irons._ And he let her do it, goddammit. Wanted her to _keep_ doing it—whatever she was doing, crying in the street and thinking he’d never _really_ lie to her, honest-to-god giving a shit about anything Tom says while he’s tinkering with that gun of hers, fixing wagon wheels for strangers who won’t even pay her anything for it, letting her dog drink beer.

It’s not that she’s a bad agent—that’s never been the problem. But she _told_ him she couldn’t do it. “When I went undercover, it was with a sniper rifle,” she’d said. “I think I need to get used to being quiet again,” she’d said. “I hate this stupid wig,” she’d said.

He should have handed her over to Glory, let her do the kind of work she’d be comfortable with: go in quick, hit ‘em hard, job done. She’d tried to tell him “I’m not a spy.” But _no,_ oh no, he’d been too busy trying to needle out the things she _wasn’t_ saying. He’d wanted to figure her out. ( _That’s not true._ )

It’d been more than wanting to figure her out; he’d wanted to _know_ her _._ ( _Still not true._ )

It’d been more than that too.

“I _do_ know stuff about you; that was my job,” he says into the wall. “But I just wanted you to _tell_ me stuff.” _Fuck all if I know_ why _._

( _Liar, liar. Her hair and her hands and her voice, that’s why. Her grin and her legs and her really dumb jokes._ )

And now she’s on that ship, surrounded by fanatics in power armour, and if she slips up, they’ll—

He takes a deep breath, pulls a cigarette out of his pocket and falls back onto the bed, props his feet on the headboard and lets his head hang over the foot of the mattress.

Des is wrong. Whisper might not be a spy, might not be quite the same kind of agent Deacon is, but she isn’t stupid. It’s not the Railroad that’s at risk, not the Railroad he’s worried about. It’s Tens.

She shouldn’t be there. She shouldn’t be with those people. She should be _here._ Right here, with him.

Hell, maybe that’s wrong too—maybe _that’s_ where he really messed up. She just wanted to find her kid. Fuck’s sake, she just wants to find her _kid_ and he made her a puzzle, led her to the Railroad, then she was more than a puzzle, and now...

 “You probably don’t even know how many targets are on your back,” he tells her. Not _her,_ just the picture of her in his head, standing over him wearing that grin, wondering why he’s holding an unlit cigarette and not even using the bed right. “I keep telling you, you’ve got to pay more attention. It’s gonna get you in trouble one day.”

 _Not today, though,_ he begs. _Please not today._

He doesn’t know who he’s begging to. Doesn’t believe in god, Capital G or otherwise. Doesn’t believe in karma or fate or any of that—just in people, people doing good shit or bad shit or both, and they’ve all got their reasons. Des thinks she might be compromised. Tens thinks the Railroad’s her way to her kid. He thinks they’d all be better off—( _liar, liar_ )—if he’d never even met her at all.

“You believe in that kinda stuff?” he asks, lighting up and puffing on the end of his smoke ‘til the burn catches. “You probably don’t. Wouldn’t run all over the place fixin’ everybody’s problems if you thought there was some kinda sky grandpa up there, watching over people.”

He shoves the palms of his hands against his eyes, tries to rub away the frustration and exhaustion. Doesn’t really work.

“This would’ve been a lot better if you were here,” he confesses, flicks his ashes onto the floor. Wasn’t even really that much of a job, just running interference, making sure the right people were held up at the right time in the right place. Wasn’t hard, wasn’t even _interesting,_ and sure the Railroad isn’t about _interesting,_ it’s about helping, but... Deacon loves puzzles. ( _And bad jokes too, apparently._ )

“Was thinkin’ about that fight you started, back in Goodneighbor. That was something,” he says, letting out a breath, watching the smoke rise. No wonder the walls here—everywhere—smell like smoke. Monsters and Wastelanders and a million ways to die, a million reasons to hate this life—people need to smoke. “You’ve got that going for you: you make things interesting.”

( _Liar, liar._ )

“Fun, then,” he amends. “I have fun with you. You happy now, dragging it out of me?”

It’s not any easier, really—talking to her when she’s not here.

“Guess I do owe you,” he says, giving up on the cigarette and putting it out against the floor. He wriggles around on the bed ‘til he’s straightened out, drags the ratty blanket up to his neck. “Kind of a shitty thing I did, I know. Sorry.”

( _Liar, liar._ )

_Yeah, ok, I’m not sorry._

_You better come back to me._

...

[12.21.2287 // 23:54 // Prydwen]

Tens lets her feet swing in the air, hang over the edge of the main platform of the airship while she rocks her torso back and forth—looking up at the higher levels of the Prydwen that block her view of the night sky above, looking down at the juts and cuts and muted colours of the Wasteland sprawled out below. She wonders if the Wastelanders still celebrate Christmas, if maybe it’s only known by pre-war ghouls like Daisy. Probably doesn’t matter, she decides. No lights here, no Christmas trees or wrapping paper. _Stupid idea, anyway._

It’s quiet out here at night. Just one or two guards patrolling around the edges, watching for movement and light on the ground; they don’t talk to her. And it’s... nice, too. The wind is gentle, cool against her skin, sweat slick from her spar with Haylen (the girl may play demure but she’s got a good hook). If only she could smoke. _Can’t smoke on the airship,_ Danse keeps telling her. _Can’t do this, can’t do that, we have rules for a reason Tens._ But she could sure use a cigarette.

She pulls her shirt off over her head and lets the breeze rush against her stomach and arms, runs her fingers along the peppering of scars, perfect O’s running from her shoulders to her elbows. She really needs a cigarette.

Sure, the Brotherhood’s easy: point-and-shoot, point-and-shoot, blow that up, point-and-shoot. And she’s awake all the time; she knows what to do, how to do it, when to do it. She knows fights and she knows life-and-death and she knows obeying orders without question. It’s so much easier than the Railroad, than Deacon, all twisted words and uncertainty and thinking she knows what maybe she doesn’t. It’s just...

What’s bothering her—it’s the cows. The Brahmin. They all have two heads.

Deacon had offered her some... “milk” a few weeks back, said he got it fresh off a trader’s cart just for her.

“But the cows,” she’d said, eyeing the unmarked bottle with suspicion. “They’re... they aren’t... they’re not exactly cows anymore, right?”

Sly bastard had only grinned at her. “Don’t you trust me, Whisper?”

“Well, I guess, but...”

“That’s not very convincing at all.” Then he’d tipped back the bottle and drank every bit.

And even now... _“Don’t you trust me, Whisper?” “That’s my recall code.”_

She misses him anyway.

But it’s the cows that are bugging her. Two-headed cows. She huffs and rubs her thumb along one of the burn scars on her arm.

“Mind if I join you?”

She turns to the right and Danse is standing in the main doorway, watching her like he’s genuinely curious. And he’s not even in his power armour. Makes him look _normal._ It’s weird.

“Need something, Paladin?”

He shakes his head— _“just... just call me Danse when we’re not working, ok?”_ —and covers his mouth to clear his throat. “Just wanted to check on you,” he says. “You got a little banged up earlier...”

She’s tempted to laugh at him. So grouchy all the damn time and then he runs around checking on his subordinates like an angry mother hen. “I’m ok.”

“Then, what are you doing out here?”

“Just thinking,” she says. It comes too easily, talking to Danse. He’s kind of a pain in the ass, really. He’s uptight, he’s _Big Picture,_ he’s decorum and impatience and seriousness. But he’s awkward in the way he fumbles for words sometimes, almost endearing. And there’s something familiar there, in the way he needs to be told that he’s doing what he’s supposed to be. She can understand that—hell, she’s intimately familiar with it—but she can’t understand how he can believe _this_ is what he’s supposed to be doing: the Brotherhood, the hatred, the _cause_ —it’s the cows that are bothering her. Just the cows.

He gestures to the spot beside her and she shrugs. When he takes a seat next to her, swings his legs out over the edge too, she doesn’t miss how his eyes linger—for just a second—on the too-perfect-to-be-natural scars along her arms. He looks away just as quickly though, setting his eyes forward, into the night sky.

“What are you thinking about?”

It doesn’t make any sense, how Danse can be so stern and then so genuine and still be the same person from one moment to the next. His voice is his voice, whether he’s barking orders or sitting beside her on the platform, saying “What are you thinking about?”

She just spent the day killing raiders. Would Preston see her walking over the bridge, covered in raider blood, and know she’s the same Tens who left to get scrap for another generator? Would Nick see her practicing in the lower levels of the Prydwen, shooting at synth-shaped targets, and know it isn’t her at all? _Be yourself, only a little different._ She doesn’t know how to put on Deacon’s layers. Doesn’t know if she can take them off again when she’s done. _He_ doesn’t even know how to take them off, she knows that much.

“Two-headed cows,” she says, just as easily as before. She thinks that, in another life, she and Danse would be friends. But in this one...

He scowls. “Are you up here using chems? I told you: there are no—”

“I’m not high, Danse.” She rolls her eyes but then she laughs. “I mean, I am _high_ ,” she corrects, gesturing to the air around them, the ground far below.

Nope. Nothing. She’s going to wrestle a laugh from this man if it kills her. But not tonight apparently. “I warned you about the puns, too, Tens.”

Another eye roll, muttering under her breath. “Sir, yes sir.” He’s not so bad, off-duty anyway. When it’s just the two of them, he seems to relax a bit, though not enough to laugh at her _excellent_ jokes.

She sees the corner of his lip pull up. “So, what about the cows, exactly?”

“They’ve got two heads. So it’s _one_ cow, sure, but it’s also _two_ cows.”

A wider smile, not quite laughter but almost. “ _What_ are you talking about?”

“Jesus, Danse, you aren’t listening.” How can he not hear what she’s saying? How can she speak so plainly and him not understand? “The cows. Each one has _two_ heads. It’s _two_ cows, right? Like each head probably... has its own favourite color or something.”

“Cows don’t have color preferences,” he tells her. There’s no riddles with Danse, not like there are with Deacon. _Cows don’t have color preferences._ Of course. So simple. So obvious. Can’t believe it has to be said. _But that’s not the point; that’s not it._ One head knows how to make water purifiers, how to put up settlement towers—it knows how to clear a street for a scared synth runaway and it _cares._ And one head is tired _all_ the time and it doesn’t care about _anything_ and it only knows how to point-and-shoot, point-and-shoot, point-and-shoot.

Maybe he thinks she’s kidding, but she’s not. The cows are bothering her. It’s two people—two _cows_ with one body. They’re the same cow, but they’re not. He’s not going to get it. Not Danse—he joined up with the Brotherhood, found his “purpose” and all that. The Danse he was before and the Danse he is now—they’re the same... cow. Fuck it.

She should ask Deacon about the cows. Of all the people she’s met, he’d know what she means. He’d know what she’s asking.

Actually, she should _not_ ask Deacon about the cows. Jackass would probably just laugh at her anyway, just make up some stupid story that doesn’t make any fucking sense, some stupid story that makes just enough sense that she believes it and then—

“You people take this mutation for granted,” she finally says, resigned. “It’s a shame.”

She hears Danse repeat the word under his breath. “Mutation.” He tightens his hands around the guardrails and stays quiet a moment. “I never thought of it that way,” he says. “But I guess Brahmin _are_...”

 _Mutants,_ she thinks for him. She doesn’t press him, doesn’t make him finish his sentence out loud. He wasn’t lying when he said he hated mutants. Wasn’t exaggerating. Wasn’t making a point.

Danse _hates_ them. And not just mutants. And not just Danse. This whole damn place, they all—they hate mutants and ghouls and synths and people who tolerate mutants and ghouls and synths. But not Brahmin, no, not something they can _use._ And not her, no. Not someone they can use, not someone so willing to let them use her. Willing to shoot where they point even though they—god, thinking of it, of the way these people would look at Nick or Hancock or Glory, it makes her feel sick. It makes her...

She turns her face away from Danse, doesn’t want to look at him, doesn’t want to think about the way he looked at her or might’ve been looking at her or might’ve wanted to look at her. She can’t fit the pieces together: Danse with perfect aim and the voice of Command, Danse unexpectedly bashful with compliments, Danse looking at her friends like they’re worse than rubbish.

Two cows.

But not her. She’s not really here, not really part of this. She’s only doing what Des told her, only trading intel for intel like Des promised, doing what she’s supposed to do to find her son. She’s not fighting this fight, not for the Brotherhood or the Railroad or...

She’s not Whisper or Jane Smith. She’s not the very first name either, the one she can’t remember. She’s just Tens. Doesn’t even know how to lie, not really. Doesn’t know how to be a damn spy. Doesn’t know how to “fold in butter” or machine wash delicates or talk about cows. Point-and-shoot, point-and-shoot, point-and-shoot. Might as well not be anything more than somebody else’s gun.

_Fuck._

...

[12.23.2287 // 20:00 // Prydwen]

She can’t stop thinking about Brandis. She wanted to rescue those people. She wanted to _save_ them. What a stupid, _stupid_ fucking thing to—

Haylen lunges toward her and she steps back, guards her front with her arms. She’s got to focus. Sparring’s a good thing, keeps her awake in the off-hours when there are no bullets or targets or dead teams of scribes and knights scattered around a battlefield no one came to save them from.

But Brandis, he was a Paladin, before. Like Danse. Probably just as grumpy and stern and devoted to this bullshit cause (“the good of mankind,” “the security of mankind,” “the future of mankind”) as the rest of them. And now he’s wasting away in a bunker, afraid to leave, to go back outside, face the things he faced with a team that’s been dead and left lying in the dirt for three goddamn years and—

Haylen throws out her right fist and hits Tens square in the jaw. She staggers backwards, holds up her hand, surrenders the match. She wasn’t paying enough attention, wasn’t focused, hasn’t been focused since... a while.

 _“You’ve earned my respect,”_ Danse had said.

Tens leans against the rail behind her, wipes the sweat from her forehead. She might throw up.

“You ok?” Haylen asks, a water bottle in each hand.

Tens looks at her like she’s never seen Haylen before in her life. It doesn’t make sense—neither of them belong here. _No one_ belongs here.

 _“It’s been too long; I’m of no use now.”_ Brandis had been... emaciated, pale, sick. He’d been covered in filth, rambling, had hardly known where he was, hidden away in that bunker, all by himself, just holding onto that gun like it was the only thing that mattered. A tool that’s lost its use. _Is that what I’m going to be?_

“Tens,” Haylen says again. “You alright? You look sick.”

 _“They died with honour, as brothers.”_ Where was the honor? They were shot, burned, mauled. They were _alone._ They were a team and they died _alone._ There’s no honour here. Not in this goddamn airship, not in the Brotherhood. It’s all just fucking death and if one of these people met one of her people—met Nick or Kent or Daisy or—it wouldn’t be _honour,_ it’d be murder, just hate and anger and apathy holding a gun and pulling a trigger and she wonders how many times she held her gun and pulled her trigger and didn’t care who was on the other side of her scope. Every time. It was every time. She doesn’t have to wonder. But she didn’t have a _cause,_ didn’t have some righteous reason telling her she was doing “the right thing.”

“It was different before,” Tens whispers. “No one had a face; no one had a name. Just targets. Just...” _I’m not Brandis. I don’t want to be that. Don’t want to be this._

But Haylen can’t hear her, doesn’t understand. Nobody here understands what she’s saying! Doesn’t matter if she talks in riddles or not; they don’t get it. They have a _cause_ , so they don’t have to get it. They don’t have to see anything else, don’t have to see what they do see in any other way.

She wasn’t fighting for a cause before. She was just fighting. It was Sir— _he_ was the one who... She never knew names or families or reasons, just: objective, location, time. They were just marks, just things she had to get done, didn’t know why, didn’t matter. It _wasn’t_ her; Sir was the one pointing fingers and pulling strings and making choices. She didn’t have a _cause._ Not like Danse or Maxson or the Brotherhood. Not like the Railroad. She didn’t decide what was right and what was wrong and who died, she didn’t ask questions, didn’t get answers even when she did ask. It wasn’t her fault!

Haylen dabs some water along Tens’ forehead, keeps saying her name, trying to get her to focus. But Haylen is a _nice person_ : compassionate and thoughtful and clever. Haylen likes poetry and helped her reset a generator. She doesn’t _belong here._ Danse is a _good man_ : selfless and honest and loyal. He’s always first in and last out of a fight. He pushes her to be better—to be _safe_ —whether he’s in the sparring ring with her, or groping for words of encouragement. He doesn’t _belong here._ Why are these people here? Why is she here? She doesn’t want to be here—no. She doesn’t want to _want_ to be here.

 _“I’ll manage...”_ Brandis, muttering, wringing his hands and afraid to look her in the eyes. _“So used to fighting. Everything. Everyone. I’ll manage. I’ll just... I’ll manage... I’ll...”_

She’s always awake here; she doesn’t have to think, doesn’t have to wander. Maxson points. Danse points. _Someone_ points and she shoots and the adrenaline pulses through her because there are consequences, there are people on her left and right who need her to shoot, and there doesn’t have to be a reason because Sir never gave reasons, just orders. It wasn’t her fault.

 _“I give an order, you follow it.”_ Danse had said that. He’d _said_ it. Plain and simple and no riddles, no testing her, no trying to pull her apart so he could piece her back together. Danse doesn’t lie.

But they aren’t giving her orders. They keep giving her _reasons_.

Synths are evil. Mutants are savage. Ghouls are unnatural. The good of mankind. And it’s all just hate, hate, _hate_.

What was she doing before? Her team—blowing up buildings and stealing information and taking shots through the windows of expensive hotels—what were they really doing?

Deacon is so many people all at once. She doesn’t think he knows which one he is, which bits are him. She watches him wrap himself in layer after layer and talk in riddles and tell lies and he never sheds a single skin, never goes back to who he was a minute before. Deacon is always rushing forward, changing. But she never has to ask why he does anything he does; if it doesn’t make sense, it does a minute later. She’s never going to be able to be that, one person one day and another person the next and still, somehow, be the same, mean the same things and care about the same things and want the same things. She can’t do _this_. She can’t be _here._ They give her reasons and they make it her fault that she’s shooting what—who—she’s shooting.

Deacon never says anything straight out, plainly. The jackass probably couldn’t manage “straightforward” if she hit him with a brick. And she knows him anyway, trusts him anyway. Why’s it got be _him_? He’s got a cause too.

Why can’t it be someone else? Someone who never gives her a reason at all, someone who gives her every reason they have, someone who makes the “truth” very easy?

“I need to go back,” she tells Haylen. But of course Haylen doesn’t understand her. She doesn’t even know what she means, herself—if she needs to go back to the Railroad or to Deacon or to the Vault or to Sir.

She needs to get up, get out of this sparring ring, out of this ship, out of this “brotherhood.”

She needs to peel away all these extra things she didn’t even know were here, all these layers she didn’t know she put on.

...

[12.25.2287 // 09:35 // Railroad HQ]

“Deacon.”

Glory. He’s only been back for two damn hours. He’s tired. He isn’t in the mood for this, whatever it is.

She prods him with her foot. “Stop moping around, you ass.”

He’s not moping. He was sleeping. Trying to, anyway. Never really gets any good sleep on the cots in the escape tunnel; his mind’s always running scenarios, always thinking about alternative routes in case they—whoever “they” is this time—come up from below, in case the escape tunnel’s not an escape. Weighing assets and liabilities. Maybe he and Des aren’t so different, after all. Of course, he wouldn’t fill in the escape tunnel with concrete just in case, wouldn’t send Te—Whisper into a goddamn enemy base, wouldn’t make that face Des makes when she tosses an asset into the liability pile instead. Des and her piles, PAM and her fucking variables. How many times does he have to be right before they start listening to him? Fuck’s sake, he’s been doing this long enough to have earned some trust.

_Liar, liar._

He turns over onto his stomach and covers his head with a skinny, dirty pillow.

Glory digs the toe of her boot into his ribs. “ _Get up,_ Deacon. Goddamn.”

“’M tryin’ to sleep, here,” he mutters, since it somehow escaped her notice. “Leave me alone. Go shoot somethin’.”

Two weeks.

 _Two weeks_ she’s been gone. Nobody’s heard a word from her, nobody’s seen her. And he can’t get that lie out of his head. (He’s still not sorry he did it. Hell, if he’s sorry for anything it’s that he didn’t do _more,_ that he didn’t do his _job,_ that he didn’t prepare her for something like this. Going undercover, going silent—it’s fucking hard and he’s got it down to a science, does it all the time, _lives_ it twenty-four seven. Deacon hardly knows who Deacon is and fuck knows he’s tired, he’s burnt out.) All he keeps thinking about is dead drops and her burning that piece of paper. Safe-houses he needs to check on and him dangling her son just out of reach, knowing he couldn’t help her, her not taking the bait just like she hadn’t with Nick back in Goodneighbor. Reports he needs to finish and her not calling him a liar when he deserved it the most. Assets and liabilities, the escape tunnel and her in an airship full of people with guns who’d shoot down every single person in this building without a bit of hesitation.

And before that, the time he was with her—they were partners. He’d been around longer, yeah, observing, considering, but when they were together, when she’d known he was there... _You knew that, didn’t you? I was there. I lied but I meant every word. All the time._

Glory puts her foot on his back and leans her weight on it. “Deacon,” she says, pressing down a little more with each word. “Get your ass off that mattress or I’m gonna squash you into it.”

“ _What_ , Glory? What is it?”

“Whisper’s back.”

...

[12.25.2287 // 09:35 // Railroad HQ]

“This is what I’ve got so far,” Tens says, passing a few sheets of paper over Des’ desk. “There’s a rough inventory, names of the top ranking, and the locations of a couple of outposts I’ve been to recently.”

Des nods her head as she shuffles through them, dragging her finger down the lines of scribbled writing. “This is good, Whisper. This is a good start.”

Tens can’t help but be a little bit pleased with herself. No doubt Deacon would have gotten all this and more by now; hell, he’d probably have Elder Maxson’s shower schedule, shoe size, and a sample of his hair. But she’d had to do some serious work herself, get access to the armoury, play at grocery shopping for Proctor Teagan, had to put up with all those awkward, invasive questions from Knight-Captain Cade.

“So, have you made any progress with the Institute? What do we know about Shaun?”

“Not much,” Des says. “Are these the specs for the ship? If we can take the Prydwen...”

“Yeah, I got them from one of the engineers; I was helping with some maintenance.” She shuffles in her seat; it’s not impatience, exactly, it’s just— “But ‘not much’ is still something, right? So—”

Des shakes a page in her hand to straighten it out and squints at it. “How in the hell did the Brotherhood get access to this many nukes?”

It takes a second, to realize what Des is even talking about, to shift her mind back over to _Railroad Talk._ “Oh, we, uh—they took an old military fort. There’d been some kind of experimental development or some—”

“What kind?”

“Wha—I dunno, with power armour or nuclear shielding or something.”

“Can you confirm that? Does the base have records?” Des isn’t even _looking_ at her.

“I had to hand over the paperwork we found to Proctor Quinlan; he’s the—”

Now, Des is looking at her—all sharp eyes and an expression somewhere between anger and disbelief. “You didn’t make copies? Tell them it was destroyed? You just—you just _handed it over_?”

Suddenly, Tens is feeling a bit less pleased about her progress. But of course she’d handed it over, of course she’d gone through the old desks and file cabinets, gathered everything she’d found into a neat little stack, handed it over to Quinlan with a pleased grin. They’d... they’d ordered her to. “ _I give you an order, you follow it.”_ She’s always followed Sir's orders, she’s always—and those damned cows, with their two heads and one body. Of course she’d handed it over; she hadn’t thought...

She tugs at the collar of her shirt. Loose as it is, it feels tight, too tight. She just turned over the names of her superiors ( _but they aren’t my superiors_ ), isn’t that worth something? She just gave up information about their weapon stores ( _but they aren’t my weapons_ ), isn’t that worth a little information in return? _“I’ll manage. So used to fighting. Everything. Everyone. I’ll manage.”_ It isn’t her fault; they gave her orders, she just—

“Des, what about Shaun?” Her voice sounds strained—pathetic—even to herself. She just... she did this to find her son, she _did._ “You said you’d be working on finding Shaun.”

Des takes a breath and snuffs out her cigarette against her desk. “Whisper, I know you’re anxious to get to your son. I understand. But we’re working on it, ok? We’ve got a lot of other agents doing a lot of other work. Tourists and packages are all over the place; the Institute’s getting suspicious with the Brotherhood here; runaways fewer and farther between. I can’t just put everything on hold to chase leads we don't have.”

 _“Can’t just put everything on hold.”_ She has to fight back the urge to roll her eyes. It’s just like Danse, Mr. Rank and File, always puts his mission first and it’s too damn bad we lost our guys but “they died with honour,” so it’s fine, right? Just like Sir, keeping all those secrets because she doesn’t need to know what’s really going on, just needs to do her job.

Sure, Tens understands. Des might be a better person than Maxson or Sir, may have a better cause but it’s still a _cause,_ and people with _causes_ can’t see anything outside the lane that leads to the end they want, the numbers, the bottom line. She’s not here to fight for a cause, no matter what else she’s here to do.

But Des has already moved on, already got her nose back in those pages, already forgotten that Tens just wants to find her kid, just wants to tell her baby that she’s sorry. Again. Just wants to make up for everything she did wrong.

“What’s this about Brandis?”

“He’s, ah... You don’t need to worry him. He’s not... not himself anymore. Just some old man in a bunker, he—”

“Where?”

“What?”

“Where’s the bunker? Your report here says that he was a Paladin, that he’s not part of the Brotherhood anymore. He could be an asset, could give us information.”

Tens shakes her head. “No. No, he—Brandis isn’t going to help the Railroad, Des; he’s not a... a _resource,_ he’s just—”

“ _I’ll_ make that call, agent.”

No. No, Brandis is just some sad old man. _A tool that’s lost its use._ No.

“I don’t remember where the bunker is.”

Des looks up from the report again. She looks at Tens for a very long minute, looks _for_ something but Tens doesn’t know what, or why, or if she finds it.

“I see.”

...

[12.25.2287 // 09:55 // Railroad HQ]

Their voices are sort of muffled, hard to hear through the door and over the din of the main room—Tom buzzing and beeping and hammering at his table, tired agents chatting over warm-ish food, Carrington being... himself (and Deacon swears the prick’s making a point of it today)—but he catches most of it. Enough.

Enough to know it’s her. She’s back. He can breathe.

But also enough to know that it’d be stupid to relax now. Enough to know that Whisper didn’t get as much intel as Des expected—or got it and didn’t give it—and Des needs to know _why._ Enough to know that Whisper’s holding something back, that she’s losing her cool, that something is wrong.

Glory swings herself into a chair beside him. “You gonna even pretend not to listen at the door?”

“Why bother?”

“Fair enough,” she says, but he doesn’t like that look on her face, that lilt in her voice.

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” he says.

“Sure it ain’t.”

“It’s _not._ ”

She shrugs. “Ok.”

This is why Glory would make a _terrible_ spy. It’s not even occurred to her—she hasn’t even realized—god, and Whisper’s just the same. Probably in there right now giving Des her report and doesn’t even see the glint in the boss’s eyes, doesn’t even get why Des would worry or what she’s worried about.

There’s a shuffle and the door opens and Whisper’s practically walked into Glory’s chair before she even sees the two of them sitting there. Maybe he’s glad Glory’s here, after all.

“And here’s my favourite spy,” Glory says, rising from her seat and letting Whisper draw her into a hug.

“Thought _I_ was your favourite spy,” Deacon says, watching how Whisper buries her face in Glory’s neck.

“You got replaced,” Glory says. “She’s so much nicer.”

Even Whisper laughs at that and, yeah, he’s really glad Glory’s here. Kinda wishing she’d stop hogging the hugs though. Could let go anytime, is all. Now. Now would be great.

“How was it?” he finally asks her, when it doesn’t seem like she’s ever going to let go of the other woman. “You ok?”

She doesn’t answer right off, doesn’t even open her eyes for a second; he’d swear her arms tighten around Glory’s waist. But she’s here, she’s fine, so it couldn’t have gone badly. Not as badly as he’d worried it might, anyway.

Glory pulls away just enough to grip Whisper’s chin. “Hey, you alright?”

With her face turned up toward the light—she’s not alright. But she nods. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just tired. Just need to get some rest before I head back.”

 _Back_. She’s going _back._ Of course she is.

He should talk to Des, get a better read on things, do damage control...

“Come on,” he says, putting his hand on her arm. “Let’s get you some rest then.”

It doesn’t take much convincing, steering her toward the cot he only just left. Doesn’t take much convincing on his part either—weighing whether he ought to go talk to Des (he should) or whether he ought to stay here (he shouldn’t), worry over the new bruises and cuts running up her arms and legs (he shouldn’t), lean his back against the wall and sit with her (he shouldn’t), running his fingers through her hair, listening to the way her breath evens out, watching the slight parting of her lips and her fingers curling around the edge of an old sheet and dirt covering every visible inch (he shouldn’t, he shouldn’t, he shouldn’t).

“You need a bath,” he tells her, stilling his hand in her hair to brush some of the dirt off her face.

“I missed you, you stupid asshole,” she says, half-in, half-out of sleep already.

“Can’t imagine why,” he tosses back. “Didn’t miss you at all.”

_Liar, liar._

...

[12.27.2287 // 19:20 // Weston]

“What d’you think? I counted nine.” He passes her the rifle and she looks through the scope at the building. He can see her lips moving as she counts— _one, two... four, five—_ but when she gets to seven, when her teeth press into her lower lip and she has to pause to readjust, find the next target, he looks down, shoves his hands into his pockets.

Des said to watch her.

“You were wrong,” she’d said, pointing at him with that cigarette, the smoke wafting through the air with every accusatory gesture. “She’s gonna crack, burn out. She’s not intel-level material. Fuck’s sake Deacon, withholding intel’s half-way to turning traitor.”

 _Then you shouldn’t have sent her to the fucking Brotherhood,_ he’d held back. _Shouldn’t have made a reckless decision based on an off-hand comment about meeting some Paladin in some run-down Police station._

It’s not Tens’ fault. It’s him. Throwing her at the Railroad, then at Des because he’d wanted her around and then he’d _kept_ wanting her around. It’s Des, so desperate to get rid of a problem before the problem gets rid of her that she only looks at it like a race. It’s the Institute like it’s always the Institute, stealing and killing and ruining people and making things like the Railroad—even like the goddamn Brotherhood—necessary. _Always_ the fucking Institute.

But it doesn’t matter whose fault it is. Just matters that Des isn’t right. Not about this. “She’s not gonna crack,” he’d told her. “She just needs a break.”

“A _break_? Are you out of your mind? Do I need to remind you what’s at stake here?”

“Don’t you fucking question my dedication, Des.”

“It’s not your dedication I’m questioning,” she’d said, turning back to her desk. “Take her out then, watch her. You’re the man with the plans, Deacon. Better figure one out.” But it’s what she hadn’t said that mattered. It’s always about that—what people don’t say. Makes everything they _do_ say pointless. Liars just as much as he is.

 _I trust her,_ he hadn’t said. Why hadn’t he said it?

Whisper is not gonna crack. She’s not a risk. She’s _in_ danger; she isn’t _the_ danger. Why doesn’t Des see that? Why doesn’t she care? ( _Because she’s got hundreds of other people to care about, because she’s got runaways and agents and tourists to care about, because she’s just one woman carrying the weight of every wrong she wants to right. Because that’s what happens when a person becomes a cause, what happens to all of us._ ) But he’s got to figure it out, come up with a Plan B because they’ll be back at HQ by tomorrow and Des’ll be expecting an answer; what’s he supposed to say?

Whisper holds the gun out to him, doesn’t quite let go of it. “Yeah,” she says, looking at the building and her hand still absently resting on the rifle. “I only count nine.”

He waits ‘til she realizes, ‘til she lets go and looks down at her hand, pulls it away so he can sling the gun over his back. He laughs at her and she rolls her eyes.

“Only? Your confidence is great and all, but since when are nine angry, green giants _only_ anything?”

She elbows him in the ribs, smirks ( _that’s the grin, that’s the one_ ) and says “Danse and I killed—”

And then she stops. Her face pales a bit and she looks away.

_Danse. Danse, the Railroad’s “in.” Danse, the Brotherhood Paladin. Danse, the guy in the armour with the guns and the army following behind. The guy who can’t find out who Whisper is._

But she’d stopped, looked away. So what’s she not saying?

“I think we should go around,” she says.

Some people—people like Drummer Boy and Carrington—they think Deacon’s afraid, that he lies because he doesn’t know how to tell the truth, that he likes liars because he doesn’t know how to hear it either.

Sometimes they’re right. Mostly though, it’s that Deacon knows that words are only words. They aren’t real. They aren’t the heart of a thing, the “truth” of it. The world runs on metaphors, on lies. It’s never just about what people say out loud.

“You don’t think we can handle nine of them?” _Are you afraid? You weren’t before._

“We can,” she says, but she’s twisting the hem of her shirt in one hand, dragging the palm of the other across the gun on her hip. “But we don’t have to. No reason not to just... avoid them.”

“Is my little Agent Loudmouth passing up a chance to fire her gun?” _What’s changed? What’s wrong? How do I help?_

“It’s just—well, that’s not the point, is it?” She tosses a hand toward the building, toward the nine mutants inside. “We just need to get back; doesn’t matter if we take this street to get there. Plenty of other streets between here and HQ.”

That’s what she’s saying. “No reason not to.” “That’s not the point.” “Doesn’t matter if we take this street.” But it’s never just about what people say out loud.

 _“She’s not gonna crack,”_ he’d said. That’s what he’d said but that hadn’t been the heart of the thing. _I trust her._

 _“That’s my recall code,”_ he’d said. That’s what he’d said, but that hadn’t been the truth of it. _You can’t trust everyone. That’s the secret. That’s how we survive this whole thing. Take it, be angry, but know it._

But her truth was different— _is_ different. _“I don’t need this.” “I don’t need you to teach me that.”_

_Then what do you need?_

_Show me, Tens. I don’t know how to ask you, but you can trust me too._

She’s right: there’s plenty of other streets between here and HQ. He doesn’t want to take any of them. Not yet. He almost reaches toward her—doesn’t know why, whether he means to grab her hand or push her hair off her neck or just to...

He shrugs. “Why don’t we just hang back a while?”

“Hang back? I’ve got to get back to—”

“It’s gettin’ dark anyway. We’ll get some sleep, take another street in the morning,” he says. “Des and Danse can wait a few more hours.”

“Yeah. Yeah that sounds good.” Her relief is obvious: the slouch in her shoulders, a breath of air, grip loosening on her gun. She nods her head, stretches out her fingers. “Thanks.”

Des said to watch her. So he’s watching her.

But not for Des, not for the Railroad. Just this once.

...

[12.27.2287 // 17:20 // Weston]

He drags a second mattress from the neighbouring room and pushes it near hers—not right up against it, of course, just close.

She’s standing on the other side of the room, arms wrapped around her stomach, staring out the window. That’s different too. She doesn’t like windows.

He just watches her for a minute, just... because.

Not a lot of light in here, just a spare candle he dug out of their bag, and just enough coming through the window to silhouette all those loose, frizzy curls of hair, the curve of her waist, her hips, the stiff line of her shoulders.

He scuffs his boot along the floor—to let her know he’s there—and collapses, clumsily, onto his pitiful little cot, letting his hands and feet hang over the edges. Even if he were to stretch out his hand, he’s not so close that he can touch the side of her bed. And that’s good; he’d not wanted to make her feel—he’d just wanted her to be close, is all. Wanted her to know he was close too.

“When’d you take up star-gazing?” he tries.

It’s not laughter, not exactly, but it’s that happy hum she makes sometimes—usually when she finds something interesting (paper, she’s fond of paper; almost never writes anything down though).

“You better hope we’re never stuck with me for navigation,” she says, not having moved. “I don’t know a thing about stars. We’d never find our way back.”

_Back where?_

He shrugs, though she’s not looking. “We’re not in any hurry,” he says.

He doesn’t hear it when she turns away from the window, doesn’t really hear her footsteps either, can just feel the tremble of the movement in the floor as she walks toward the mattresses. Barefoot then. Maybe she’s gotten more comfortable than he’d thought.

“You know,” he says, trying not to watch her crawl into the cot next to him. “I had a pet radstag once.”

She snorts at that and he can’t stop himself from turning his head toward her—just for a second, just long enough to see that grin of hers but he catches sight of her hand too, hanging over the edge of her bed just like his, so close, too close—then he shrugs it off and looks back at the ceiling. Too dark now to even see the dirt but he knows it’s there; ain’t a spot in the Commonwealth that isn’t covered in dirt.

“You liar,” she says and he grins too.

_Call ‘em like you see ‘em, Tens._

“Oh, I did though,” he says. “Won it in a card game from a ghoul in Goodneighbor.”

“Oh is that all? That’s the dullest story you’ve ever told me,” she says, reaching out just far enough to swat him on the wrist. It’s over as suddenly as it’d happened, that touch, and she’s back on her own bed, looking up at the same dirty ceiling he is, but he almost reaches across the gap for her hand. Almost.

“Why don’t you tell me one, Tens?”

“Wh—what’d you say?” The humour’s all but gone now and her voice is nothing but breathless. Not the bad kind of breathless, exactly, but not the great kind either.

“Tell me,” he repeats, all his humour gone too. “A story. I know you’ve got some new ones.”

She’s quiet for a while this time and he doesn’t push her. He lies on his back in the silence, his fingers inches from hers, and he waits, for a story or a lie or a bit of truth. It’s all the same with her, all the same with him. _I’m here,_ he wants to tell her. _I’m listening._

“I had a pet cow once,” she begins. It’s something like cheer in her voice. At first. “Somebody dropped a bomb on us though, and we crawled out of a vault with two heads apiece. I had to give the second head a name but the cow didn’t really—” Her voice cracks and he almost reaches toward her again because he remembers how she’d cried up in Malden too, remembers how he’d wanted to drag his thumb across her face, wanted to wipe off the dirt and the tears. But he also remembers that he didn’t. So he doesn’t, again. And she tries to grin—he can’t see it, but he can hear it in her voice: an attempt, _a lie._ “And then I met this asshole who tried to give me some irradiated cow milk. Ruined my whole day.”

He remembers that day. It’d been interesting—fun. It’d been fun. _“Don’t you trust me, Whisper?”_ And he hadn’t known which answer he’d wanted. ( _Liar, liar._ ) He’d known which answer he wanted: the one he wasn’t supposed to, the same one he wanted not to want when he was sitting in a subway car with her and said _“This is my recall code.”_

“It was Nuka Cherry,” he says, his own lips turning up in a smile. 

“What?”

“It was Nuka Cherry, Tens,” he says again. “I’d never give you irradiated cow milk, come on.”

It’s quiet again. And he thinks maybe she’s gone to sleep, wonders if he’d even be able to see her in this darkness, were he to turn over and look. But then he just barely feels her fingertips searching for his from across that little gap he’d made.

“Fuckin’ Nuka Cherry,” she says and the grin he hears in her voice this time, it’s real.

He doesn’t quite reach toward her yet, more like he just stretches out his hand, just a little, just to let her know he’s there, he’s close, and she knows what he’s saying now—he knows she does because then it’s not just barely-there fingertips, but her fingers tangled up with his, her arm reaching just that little bit farther, to let him know she’s there, she’s close, and he can reach back.

So he does.

“You didn’t let me finish earlier,” he says, eyes still toward the ceiling but there’s intent now, when he squeezes her hand, when he shifts a little closer to her and feels her shift a little closer to him, still on their own beds but as close to each other as they can be. For now. “I didn’t tell you where that ghoul in Goodneighbor got the radstag. _That’s_ the real story.”

“Tell me.”

...

[01/01/2288 // 10:00 // Boston Airport]

She’s supposed to be happy, supposed to be pleased. It’s a big deal, after all, getting issued a suit of power armour from the Brotherhood of Steel. Big, official _thing_ that says “good job, soldier,” “you’ve earned my respect, soldier,” “you’re following orders, soldier, and we like that.” But then they go and set up those fucking synth-shaped targets and there’s no Prydwen caging her in, hiding her from the world she’s fallen into.

She doesn’t know what to say when Nick or Glory ask her about Gen 1’s. She doesn’t know if they’re alive or half-alive or not alive at all. She doesn’t _know_ the way she  _knows_ that Nick and Glory and H2 are alive. And she doesn’t want to decide either way—it's not her place to make a call like that—but she doesn’t want to do this either: to pretend she thinks they’re just parts and pieces and shoot at pictures of them while she learns to run and dodge and fight in this stupid, metal suit.

“You’re distracted,” Danse says, yells really, from his spot on the sidelines where he’s watching her hesitate over and over and over again because Gen 1’s don’t _look_ like people, don’t _look_ like Nick or Glory but that’s all she sees when she aims at those targets.

Maybe she should’ve taken Deacon up on that offer. “ _You don’t have to go back,”_ he’d said. _“We’ll figure something else out.”_

_“Is that worry I’m hearing, Deacon?”_

_“Of course not.”_

_“Liar, liar.”_

But she’d had to come back. For Des, for Shaun, but for her too. She doesn’t want to want to be here and she can’t figure it all out by hiding from it. But she can’t tell him that—no, it’s just that she doesn’t know _how_. 

She lowers her gun and holsters it, presses the release on her armour and climbs out without so much as a questioning glance at her Paladin.

She just leaves it there too, her armour, right in the middle of the make-shift target range he’d set up for her; it’s just an old road, a ruin, just rubble. This is the highway she took, on her first drive from the airport to the apartment she’d been assigned as a civilian. She rode in a taxi, had _one_ footlocker of spare shirts and underwear, and she cried the whole goddamn way. Her cab driver had just stayed quiet, just watched her in his rear view mirror, had eventually turned on the radio to tune out the sound of her awkward sobbing.

She jerks a pack of smokes out of her pocket and lights one up.

“I don’t recall saying practice was over,” Danse says, but his voice lacks the usual sternness it carries when they’re working.

“You need to relax more.”

“Say again?” And there it is: a bit of sternness, a bit of warning. But it’s still not... not quite...

She huffs.

“You need to relax more, _Paladin_ ,” she says, offering him a cigarette. He shakes his head and there’s that little half-hearted chuckle she can sometimes manage to drag out of him. It’s still not a laugh, not really. One day. There _has_ to be a sense of humour in there somewhere.

“You’re a good soldier,” he says quietly, in that grouchy way he has. “When you aren’t distracted, anyway.”

“Was that a compliment? Must be the end of the world,” she says, sucking in as much smoke as she can, holding it in her mouth for a second before she releases it. “Oh, wait. That already happened.”

Another half-hearted chuckle from him. And that hadn’t even been a joke. Go figure.

“I told you about—about Cutler,” he says.

She nods. She doesn’t want to hear the story again, doesn’t want to hear the _reason_ Danse hates Mutants, the _reason_ Danse is here, with the Brotherhood, the _reason_ she ended up meeting him back in Cambridge all those months ago.

“So you understand then,” he says, and she shakes her head.

“No. No I don’t. I do, but I don’t. Why are you _here,_ Danse? Why’d you choose to _stay_ here after...” She takes a deep breath and rolls up her sleeves. So goddamn hot out here, so hazy. She doesn’t want to understand, doesn’t want Danse to tell her why it’s so easy for him to look at mutants and synths and ghouls and see monsters instead of people. She is _not_ going to be Brandis. She’s not going to be Des, either, looking at people and seeing numbers instead, statistics, wins and losses and assets and liabilities. _Don’t tell me about your cause,_ she thinks, pressing the tip of her cigarette to her arm. _Don’t tell me about your reasons._

She doesn’t really hear him when he shouts at her, just knows that must be what he’s doing. Doesn’t really feel it either, when those metal hands are clamped around her wrist, but she sees her arm being pulled away, her cigarette falling to the ground and the little O on her other arm burning raw.

“What the hell are you doing, Tens?”

“Don’t you get tired of all this Danse? Don’t you get sick of sleep-walking through all this shit? All this fucking killing, all these fucking reasons it’s _right_?”

He lets go of her wrists, makes a point of grinding her discarded smoke into the ground under his foot, and she’d think he was mad if she didn’t know his face, if she didn’t hear that fumbling in his voice. “I just... I just meant that I—I want you to focus on what you’re doing because I don’t want anything like that to happen to you.”

A pause. Because he’s a good-hearted, bad-hearted fool who fumbles for words and she was wrong. She’d thought they might be friends, her and Danse, if only things were different, if only she was really part of this or if he really wasn’t. The reasons don’t matter, never did, because she got herself into this fight—two different sides of this fight that she doesn’t want to fight at all anymore—and she shot at not-people and people and maybe-people to keep him safe because he’s wrong (he _is_ wrong) about all this but he’d been shooting too, been trying to keep her safe even as he dragged her into the fight beside him. Just like her old team, her old partner, all of them fighting for the wrong people but also for each other. Just like Deacon, too. This stupid asshole with a grouchy voice and a heart that’s learned to hate people she loves— _he’s my_ _fucking friend god fucking damn it._

And she’s a _liar._ She’s been lying to him the whole time, lying to Haylen too, and Rhys and every single person who’s sparred with her on the Prydwen and helped her clear a fort or a building or a field. _It was for my son. It was. It was for Shaun._ But she doesn’t know how to put layers on and take layers off and the Brotherhood’s cause—she’d decided when she first met him, pretended this whole time that she hadn’t—it’s _wrong._ They’re all wrong, the way they’d look at Glory and Nick and Hancock, they way they target shoot at pictures that look like people she loves.

The Brotherhood is _wrong_ and she’s been lying to Danse and she _cares._ Because this was never the point! She could have gone around, could have avoided it all just like that building full of mutants on the way back to HQ with Deacon.

When Nick had a way to her son, she said no. No, she didn’t want him to plug Kellogg into his head. No, she didn’t want to lose him. And when Deacon had a way to her son—even if it was a lie—she’d said no. No, she didn’t want him to reset. No, she didn’t want to lose him. A hundred different streets between her and her son and she picked the Railroad, picked a _cause._

Has _any_ of this really been for Shaun?

She knew, walking back to Cambridge, that it was gonna be this way: the Railroad was the way to her son; the Brotherhood was the way to her son.

She’s gonna have to make another choice, gonna have to choose a side, pick a fucking _cause_ of her own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Want to take a sec to clarify some things:  
> -Yes, I buy into all those Railroad Conspiracy Theories.  
> -No, I don't think Desdemona is a bad person.  
> -No, there is no budding Deacon/Tens/Danse love triangle.


End file.
